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Digital Harmony

On the Complementarity of Music
and Visual Art

John Whitne;

“sol”

Digital Harmony

On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art

John Whitney

Byte Books/A McGraw-Hill Publication/Peterborough New Hampshire

No part of this hook may he used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Library of Congress Cataloging in
Publication Data

Whitney, John H.

Digital Harmony

Bibliography: p.

Includes Index

1. Art and Music. 2. Computer Drawing.
3. Computer Composition. I. Title.
ML3849.W5 700 80-22150

ISBN 0-07-07001 5-X

Type set in Times Roman typefaces by
R S Typographies, Los Angeles.

Printed by Kingsport Press, Kingsport, Tennessee
on Warren's Lustro Offset Dull Enamel
Book paper.

Dedication

When I first went to Paris, I did so instead
of returning to Pomona College for my Junior
year. Looking around, it was Gothic architec-
ture that impressed me most. And of that ar-
chitecture I preferred the flamboyant style of
the fifteenth century. In this style my interest
was attracted by balustrades. These I studied
for six weeks in the Bibliotheque Mazarin,
getting to the library when the doors were
opened and not leaving until they were
closed. Professor Pijoan, whom I had known
at Pomona, arrived in Paris and asked me
what I was doing. (We were standing in one
of the railway stations there.) I told him. He
gave me literally a swift kick in the pants and
then said, “Go tomorrow to Goldfinger. I'll
arrange for you to work with him. He's a
modern architect." After a month of working
with Goldfinger, measuring the dimensions of
rooms which he was to modernize, answering
the telephone, and drawing Greek columns, I
overheard Goldfinger saying, “To be an
architect, one must devote one's life solely to
architecture." I then left him, for, as I ex-
plained. there were other things that interested
me, music and painting for instance. Five
years later, when Schoenberg asked me
whether I would devote my life to music, I
said, “Of course." After I had been studying
with him for two years, Schoenberg said,
“In order to write music, you must have
a feeling for harmony." I then explained to him
that I had no feeling for harmony.
He then said that I would always encounter
an obstacle, that it would be as though
I came to a wall through which
I could not pass. I said,
“In that case I will devote my life
to beating my head against that wall."

John Cage-A Year From Monday

When I first went to Paris, I did so instead
of returning to Pomona College for my Junior
year. Looking around, it was Gothic architec-
ture that impressed me most. And of that ar-
chitecture I preferred the modest style of the
eleventh-century. And in this style it was
Chartres, the Royal Portal where I sat on the
steps reading Henry Adams. Professor Kendall
who conducted singing sessions at the
Pasadena YMCA when I was in Junior High
School appeared on the seat in front of me on
my train to Italy. He was by then a Professor
of Music at USC on sabbatical in Europe and
touring Italy. I saw him again and again on
this tour, and observed that he had no taste
for the paintings of Giotto. My best friend in
Paris, a native, claimed to be the principal
Schoenberg authority in France whether he
was or not. Certainly he was the only one
teaching twelve-tone music composition in
Paris in 1939 and I was briefly and informally
one of his pupils. Two years later I explained
to Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA that my
friend, who was Jewish and who still lived in
Paris, needed help to get out of Europe. But
already Paris was an occupied city. No one
could be helped who lived there. I too had a
mind that harmony was a mere appendage to
the body of music though my feelings for
Beethoven and Schoenberg Quartets should
have discredited that idea. It was not until
many years later that I learned how important
Pythagoras was to Islamic ideas of design.
And later still when I learned how to deal
with Pythagorean principles of harmony on
the computer in a visual way. Now I apply the
principles of digital harmony to both image
and music. Now I understand what Arnold
Schoenberg said to John Cage.

John Whitney- Pacific Palisades- March 1979

Contents

Foreword 4

I. On With the Revolution! 13

II. Beginning 21

III. Concept 29

IV. Problem - How Shall Motion Pattern Time? 37

V. The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano 47

VI. The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

VII. The Idea of a Scale in Music and in Visual Art 83

VIII. The Role of Color and the Role of Music 89

IX. Arabesque - An Analysis 97

X. From Music to Visual Art and Back 115

XI. Summary and Prospect 123

XII. Do It Yourself 129

Software Listings 134-137

Appendix 138
Bibliography 220

Filmography 225

Index 227

Illustrations

1. Elemental differential dynamics 50

2. Line plot of 12 sine curves 52

3. TD and RD arrays 56-57

* The chapters that teach digital harmony.

6 .

8 .
9.

10 .

11 .

12 .

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20 .
21 .

TD and RD arrays, different values 58-59
TD and RD arrays, one whole number step 70-71

Selected frames, Matrix III
Selected frames, Matrix
Selected frames, Matrix
Selected frames, Matrix III
Selected frames, Circles
Selected frames, Circles
Color pixel image by Information International Inc.
Schematic of basic modulo action 98
Schematic of first 360' cycles 99
Selected frames, Arabesque section one
Selected frames, Arabesque section two
Selected frames, Arabesque section three
Selected frames, Arabesque section four
Selected frames, Arabesque section six
Selected frames, Arabesque section seven
Selected frames, Arabesque border 112

100

102

104-105

106

108

110

Appendix

Audio-Visual Music: Color Music - Abstract film, 1944 138

Audio-Visual Music and Program Notes, 1946 144

Moving Pictures and Electronic Music, 1959 151

ASID Talk and Belgian Competition, 1963 156

Aspen Design Conference, 1967 167

John Whitney at Cal Tech, 1968 170

Interview with John Whitney, 1970 174

Animation Mechanisms, 1971 183

Computer Art for the Video Picture Wall, 1971 190

Cranbrook Essay, 1973 198

Democratizing the Audio-Visual Arts, 1974 207

Computational Periodics, 1975 210

Digital Pyrotechnics, 1977 213

Film Music, 1977 216

Foreword

This book records the exploration of a single hypothesis, and reveals
some modest triumphs as well as a curious problem which remains unre-
solved. Had this story begun in 1838 instead of 1938, there would have
been nothing provisional or problematical in a young person’s decision
to make his way somewhere in the field of the arts or music as I have
done. This century’s destabilizing impact upon the arts from the Dadaist
movement in the first or second decade to the present also rattles indi-
vidual careers. Although it may be curious that my work, at its apex,
appears to be both hypothetical and revolutionary, widespread late-
century equivocations and tentative new directions unsettle the arts gen-
erally, and this history reflects that influence.

Richard Wagner’s revolutionary career - personally, musically and
technically - reveals little that was hypothetical or conditional about his
life or his ideas. Even though he strained the conventions of harmony,
the conventions themselves remained secure; there was no question
about their validity. They were founded upon the harmony, the estab-
lished laws of Pythagoras, that bulwark of music which Pythagoras had
hypothesized and proved centuries before Wagner’s assaults.

While not meaning to compare myself with that nineteenth century
titan (1813-1883), I wish merely to contrast the two ages. Consider the
following:

The late Harold Rosenberg referred to . . the profound crisis that
has overtaken the arts in our epoch. Painting, sculpture, drama, music
have been undergoing a process of de-definition. The nature of art has be-
come uncertain. At least, it is ambiguous. No one can say with assurance

what a work of art is - or, more important, what is not a work of art.”*

Indeed, “The nature of art has become uncertain,” and for one
sizeable block of composers, that grand Pythagorian certainty - the
harmony - has come apart. Even so, the foundation of my work rests
first upon laws of harmony, then in turn, upon proof that the harmony
is matched, part for part, in a world of visual design. This is my hypothe-
sis. This book, a record of the formulation of that hypothesis, will show
how it has evolved as the basis for a life work. If hypotheses are rare
in art, proof within a lifetime is rarer still. Proof in these times, Harold
Rosenberg and many others would observe, is hardly likely, and there
resides my curious problem.

This hypothesis assumes the existence of a new foundation for a new
art. It assumes a broader context in which Pythagorean laws of harmony
operate. These laws operate in a graphic context parallel to the estab-
lished context of music. In other words, the hypothesis assumes that the
attractive and repulsive forces of harmony’s consonant/dissonant patterns
function outside the dominion of music. Attractions and repulsions
abound in visual structures as they become patterned motion. This singu-
lar fact becomes a basis for visual harmony with a potential as broad as
the historic principles of musical harmony.

Stravinsky is known to have remarked, “Harmony is dead.” He
meant what I imagine Arnold Schoenberg might have observed before
him, that late nineteenth-century practice of harmony was indeed
moribund. Even so, the physical fact of the low-order ratios of pitch
relations (octave, fifth, fourth, and thirds) is simply Pythagorean physical
fact, and as real as pigment and canvas are to the painter. (My use of
the term “harmony” throughout this book refers to that physical fact
of orderly ratio in both its horizontal and vertical [linear and simul-
taneous] meaning.)

This book documents how the application of graphic harmony, in
that “real” sense of ratio, interference and resonance, produces the same
effect that these physical facts of harmonic force have upon musical
structures. The book points to these forces of visual harmony at work in
a number of my recent films.

*The De- Definition of Art (New York, 1972), p. 12.

There remains a need for confirming demonstrations of that hypothe-
sis in a larger body of work. Art, unlike science, is proved by art alone,
not by mock-scientific experiment in the isolated case. Meanwhile, more
exploration of the hypothesis continues by the only means available to
the artist in this medium - by more work on film, tape or videodisc.

This book proposes to share the process of confirmation, study and
productivity with others. The dimensions of this hypothesis, expanded in
the decade since its conception, grew beyond the limits of my individual
study. I would hope that others will find on these pages adequate primary
lessons in digital harmony to begin explorations for themselves. Chap-
ter XII includes listings and descriptions of three simple programs
intended to provide the essential primary principles with which anyone
may begin*

Secondarily, this book demonstrates an example of technology’s
impact upon a career. Again, compare the ages. Wagner was not obliged
to invent the symphony orchestra. The instrumentation needed to ac-
complish his revolution was simply amply available.

By contrast, a twentieth-century invention favored by some artists -
the movie camera - has undergone many refinements requiring a
constant reinvention of technique. This expensive instrument, and its
associated lab processes, may be obsolete before the next century.

Indeed, as indicated in the second section of this foreword, motion
picture technology has been practically eliminated from my current
artworks - its place in production is being taken over by computer-related
and video processes.

Computer technology has been available to a few artists for less than
two decades. At the same time that computers are becoming household
utensils, a mixture of high expectation and stubborn opposition surrounds
the tentative use of these instruments for art. About the computer’s
applicability in art there will be much more to say throughout the book.

The purpose of this book, then, is to define, as much as I understand
them, the principles of harmony as they apply to graphic manipulation of
dynamic motion-pattern by computer. Whether my efforts constitute a
final valid grammar is irrelevant. The purpose is to document my own

*A workbook is in planning stages as I write this.

approach and to propose the seminal idea of making an approach. I
suggest there may be more than one approach needed to establish this
lively new visual art. In the chapters to follow, I will attempt to describe
an art that is to be seen and heard, diverse in its potentials both for
narrowcast (fine art) and broadcast (popular art). I expect to see an art
that will show well on the video screen and in a new kind of theatre and
gallery; it will be played everywhere on videodisc.

Words On My Hardware and Processes

Small computers have sufficient graphic capability for what I will be
discussing here. Mine is an Andromeda Systems LSI-11, a 16-bit machine
that operates on programs in Pascal similar to those discussed and
listed in Chapter XII. The overall procedure is to generate graphic action
sequences to be recorded one frame at a time with a camera of some
sort (video, 8, 16 or 35mm movie camera). My graphic display terminal
is a Tektronix 4002 (an old model, but one which I found to be well
designed for my use).

At present I am in the process of installing a complete digital music
composing capability. As I will explain in detail on these pages, image
and sound must ultimately be composed hand in hand by techniques that
were unavailable before. Of course, faster equipment would be useful for
instant real-time playback of image with sound.

Already there exist numerous personal computers that provide an
approximation of sufficient programming power, including musical and
graphic capability, to generate design such as I will describe in this book.
Small computers are available that have one-frame-at-a-time capability,
at non-real-time frame generation speeds. Only a few weeks after I spoke
at the First West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, a very young man
showed me his working example of the basic action design of my film
Arabesque which I had projected and analyzed. He worked out the
action pattern so as to run slowly, in real-time, on his Apple Computer.

My current procedure is to generate 2- to 10-second actions (or some
longer than 1-minute sequences) which are filmed by a 35mm motion
picture camera mounted above the Tektronix cathode beam display which
is placed, face up, at the exact focal plane of the camera. The computer
program sends a signal output that switches the camera for a one-frame-

at-a-time exposure after the CRT image has been computed and dis-
played. Sometimes the system is run day and night, without needing my
attention, to complete a complex sequence that I have planned.

The film is developed in my own processor and then run on a film
viewer, when, for the first time, I can judge if my planning was right and
if the action quality conforms to my vision of its function, and whether I
find in it some relevance to the larger scheme of a complete work.

In the past, making Arabesque for example, a “library” of these
black and white action sequences was accumulated on film over a period
of months; each action was selected by that slow process of judging,
one at a time, many many trial sequences, and selecting only those
which seem to fit my growing discernment of a broad “design” for a
composition.

In the making of Arabesque , I edited and compiled the final film in
color. At that time, editing was not a computer process but, more or less,
a standard film editing routine involving an optical printer with color
filters at the source of illumination. Any black-and-white film of a com-
puter sequence can be copied onto color film in any color by use of my
optical printer. Now, however, and more so in the future, the techniques
will translate into operations with digital computers and video editing
practice. Direct, interactive color control, the repertoire of video synthe-
sis of texture and feed-back type image enhancement will colorize and
“orchestrate” my basic computer-generated action compositions.

Words of Thanks

Many persons assisted me in the preparation of this book. First I wish to
name a few of the several people from computer science fields who
repeatedly displayed patience and genuine interest throughout the past
fifteen years and so aided my progress enormously.

Dr. Jack Citron of IBM, Fredrick B. Thompson, Ph.D., at CalTech
and Dean Anshultz, Ph.D., at Information International Inc.; all possessed
a broad understanding of my needs for computational particularities and
supplied them generously.

With Larry Cuba, the pattern changed: a new generation and a new,
specialized interest has surfaced. The change with him is his clear
intent to specialize as an artist in this field. He assisted in the making of

Arabesque and shares with me many of the problems of design and
programming which need continuing study.

Paul Rother came to my studio with similar ideas of reciprocating,
and he stayed to do all the Pascal programming I presently use. Without
his help, the listings of Pascal programs in Chapter XII would not be so
concise and organized.

Of this generation, now there are more. Scott Kim, Paul Newell, Jack
Bowman, Augustine Lai, David Butterfield, Richard Moszkowski and
others, each has made a contribution. The list is incomplete; still I wish
to thank each one.

My wife Jackie has given much assistance, and her insight was an
asset on a broad range of matters pertaining to this book. Before our
marriage she was an independent painter - exhibiting (and selling) with
a free and lively sense of direction; then, throughout my years of film
making, her extraordinary intuitional and critical sense was always
present. She participated in some of the most spontaneously creative
moments of my film work. And still, meaningful to our married lives,
her attention and love within our five-fold family is crucial.

We have three mature sons, involved with film more and less. I was
blessed by their triadic diversity which continues to bestow benefits
by their criticism and assistance with this book. Their names are John,
Michael and Mark (apostolicism neither intended nor offered).

Then there is my brother, James Whitney, whose career is as long
lasting as Jackie’s and mine, and serenely consistent. The diversity of
our personal dispositions pointed us in different directions early. I ad-
mired and envied his patience, discipline and craftmanship. Curiously, a
powerful motive to probe deeper into the maelstrom of electro-optical
machine technology - largely my way with machines - was ostensibly
to match what he made by hand.

At one point we spent months building an optical machine. The ma-
chine was for his use, made by his labor; I only advised him. He made
one extraordinary film with that machine.* I was away. When I returned,
he had removed it all from his studio - “to preserve his sanity,” he
said. For a few years, he abstained from filmmaking altogether; instead

*Sce James Whitney's film Lapis , and all his recent films.

he perfected a skill at producing Raku pottery, a natural antidote. His
current film work is distinctive for its maturity and his philosophical
mastery of his own personal form.

It is my brother I thank, along with Jackie. Each has helped me to
maintain a measure of balance, within the easily exceeded limits of
technological applications in the arts.

My friend, Pearce Young, former Judge of the Superior Court of
Los Angeles, Rhodes Scholar and former member of the California
State Legislature, proved to be exactly the willing expert this first book
needed. In truth, his help was obviously more valuable for his lively
interests which relate to his pioneering encouragement of home comput-
ing through his contributions to the founding of the Southern California
Computing Society and his many present interests in the development of
computer-aided educational programs.

William Moritz, Ph.D., critic, film maker, poet, and deeply involved
student of the avant gardes of film, accepted my request for help in
balancing my perspective on the filmmaking of my contemporaries, some
of whom approach design problems similar to those I have studied. Not
having used a word processor, he was amused with mine and it de-
veloped that he sat at the terminal working closely with me for many
productive sessions, bringing this book into much better shape than it
once had. If filmmakers are critical of my ideas regarding aspects of
their medium today, they should turn their attention towards me, not the
good doctor Moritz. For I argued with him and, of course, prevailed, it
being my book. But I owe William Moritz much gratitude for his help
and for editing the appendix and creating the index.

Lawrence Morton provided advice on the subject of music. I needed
to be reminded that I am neither authoritative nor professional in matters
of music. Lawrence Morton is professional. He is one of the most dearly
admired men of music on the western side of the United States having
been involved in creating highly respected contemporary chamber music
concert programming in Los Angeles and Ojai throughout the second
half of this century. He applied his thoughtful attention to musical detail
and has contributed much to the book. However I could not begin to
satisfy his rigorous requirements for the language of music; I needed to
stretch conventional meaning again and again. He is blameless for this.

I may, or may not, have gained anything by my literary innovation.

Finally I needed assistance from someone who would know what I
did not know about contemporary art and American artists throughout
the period of my own struggles, as Brian said, “at the barricades of an
art frontier.” Brian O’Doherty’s role as an editor of Art in America and
his present position with the National Endowment for the Arts certainly
overqualified him, while it honored me to receive his help.

This book is designed by Ron Rozzelle. We have a bond of under-
standing about design problems; we were both associated with the office
of Charles and Ray Eames, though at separate times. Most who knew
and worked in and out of the Eames design office over the past thirty
years have come away with a bond of some sort. Work there was almost
always a difficulty bearing with it a genuine sense of accomplishment
which we always shared finally at the grandest conclusions. I know
we will share that sense of accomplishment when this book goes
to press. Ron is tireless.

My deepest gratitude and sincere thanks go to Ed Kelly, Nicholas
Bedworth, Sheila Hayward and Ellen Klempner of Byte Books for their
consistent help and cooperation in the making of this book.

Pacific Palisades, July 1980.

Chapter I

On With The Revolution

Another major media revolution, ranking with sound for the movies,
radio, or the upheavals of TV, will soon introduce wonderful inventions
into the home. The videodisc, a new product in the marketplace, will
generate the greatest potential for change usually associated with this
kind of turnover. The videodisc’s ingenious application of digital repro-
ducing technology combines microscopic sight and sound tracks of
great technical efficiency and economy.

Being an early partisan, I trained with computers for years, under-
ground, preparing for the day when videodiscs would take over the mar-
ketplace. I dreamed in “video music’’ and plotted secret revolutionary
fusions and transfusions of the arts. More on this will be discussed later.

As is usual in the tumult of revolutions, a promising application for
the videodisc’s sight-and-sound intermix languishes more in confusion
than in hope. Yet an inevitable artistic application, which I will describe,
should popularize an exciting and innovative fusion of music and visual
art. The future of an integral aural/visual art is assured by wide distribu-
tion through the videodisc’s economics and logistics. What would an
integral aural/ visual art be like? And what’s new about it?

A1 Jolson’s voice and his picture on the screen were about the only
aural/visual components of the “art’’ of the first sound movie. Between
that day and now, much has happened in the worlds of art. Both the fine
arts and the popular arts have been changed by de-definition and even
ephemeralization. Cross-fertilization and synthesis opened many eyes
and ears to new and different points of view regarding art and music. So
it is timely to compare the perception of music with the viewing of art.

See p. 132 for a description of these chapter heads.

Most people visualize music as two-dimensional, with time repre-
sented by the horizontal lines and pitch by vertically arrayed symbols, as
is the convention on paper. But the perception of music is not two di-
mensional. The ears reside at the center of a spherical domain. We hear
from all around. We hear music as patterns of ups and downs, to and fro
in a distinctly three-dimensional architectonic space - a space within.

The eye, more outwardly oriented, perceives objects and events out-
side at the point where our eyes focus. Yet the eye enjoys design equally
as well as the ear. The mind’s eye shares with the ear any inward expe-
rience of architectonic spatial constructions and would perceive them
with the same pleasure, were they to exist.

The fact is, however, that these interior fluid visual edifices hardly
exist. Anyone can visualize an architectural fantasy of music dancing in
the head, but manifesting it in reality is another matter! Each century
since Leonardo, a vision, grand and obscure as its myth, compelled one
or two inventors to struggle with the pathetic inadequacies of the color
organ. Twentieth-century abstract art has been a training ground for
visual response to musical experience, but in the mind’s eye, architecture
in motion lies at the root of our enjoyment of music. Many people, with
closed eyes at a concert, are “watching” the music, but after all these
centuries, there still exists no universally acceptable visual equivalent
to music! It should exist, and it will soon. Incidentally, it will surely not
be called “video music.”

Many people whose innermost responses, in fact, fit the above
description, are nevertheless apprehensive about the idea of abstract musi-
cal architectonics; they imagine music to be exclusively representational.
Some visualize those descriptive images called upon by the romantic
composers of tone poems, while others falter with literal “realities” by
associating music with images of conductor, performer, opera star, rock
star - even the occasionally lurid images of pop music lyrics.

Besides the technicalities, then, this is another reason why there
exists no universally acceptable visual equivalent to music. Also we may
observe that many more people consider music a totality by itself. Music
does not need images any more than paintings need sound. (Of course,
this does not invalidate the hypothesis presented here.)

The exact perceptual experience of music needs a more precise term

14 On With the Revolution!

than the lame metaphor “architecture.” There are no words for the
dynamics of architectonic pattern which stress the fluidity and diverse
expressiveness of musical motion. The ear perceives patterns of tone
by means of infinitesimal inflections of microscopic bundles of air: the
tonal “clay” the composer sculpts is flexible and dynamic. Newton’s
laws of mass or thermodynamic laws do not cease when a string quartet
performs. Air moves more swiftly, and easier than clay or paint. Almost
any material an artist might select is too sluggish to sculpt in time and
motion - too languid or too inertial for a visual medium meaning to
imitate music, or to vie with music’s dynamism*

In the last third of this century, we acquired a visual medium which
is more malleable and swifter than musical airwaves. That medium is
light itself. While it was always available, the means to modulate light
precisely and faster than sound (on a cathode-ray computer display, for
example) is a very recent practicality. Musical instruments that modulate
the air medium of hearing are now matched by other instruments which
modulate, with greater exactitude and speed, the light medium of sight.

These two will make a surprisingly happy combination, provided the
influences of musical tradition do not dominate or dampen the potential
vitality of the visual sibling. The audio-visual tracks of the videodisc
obviously are best suited for this balanced complementary partnership of
sound and sight.

In the sense that the natural laws of acoustical physics must have ac-
companied the evolution of atmosphere on earth, laws of harmony must
have accompanied the very evolution of human musical culture, long be-
fore Pythagoras. But in spite of the extraordinary successes of the classic
composers, and in spite of the facts of harmonic law, many composers
of this century have rejected principles of harmonic relationships and
tonality. The “crisis” of contemporary music noted by Pierre Boulez and
others is due largely to this rather unpopular ongoing search for other
principles with which to capture a world of “new musical resources.”

Yet the art of music deals with harmonic laws of physics. The basic
intervalic ratios of tuning and tone sequence exist simply as physical

*See Frank J. Malina, Kinetic Art (New York, 1974); Frank Popper, Origins and Development of
Kinetic Art (New York, 1968); and George Rickey, Constructivism (New York, 1967).

fact. Arnold Schoenberg told John Cage, “In order to write music, you
must have a feeling for harmony.”* The truth of this remark was not
diminished by Cage’s protest that he had no such feeling for harmony -
just as the truth of physical law would not diminish were the late
sculptor David Smith to have protested that he had no feel for the weight
and mass of steel.

Music doesn’t just pass time. Music shapes time. In the symphonies
of Haydn and Mozart, repeating elements occur twenty to forty times.
This amount of repetition (within a rhythmic pattern) seldom occurs in
poetry, or prose or any of the other arts that evolve in time, except
music. It is as if the composer states a figure, takes thirty or forty steps
(beats of a driving rhythm), and follows that with another figure. The
steps are hardly repeats. Steps along a flow of time take us from here to
there in time just as surely as our footsteps transport us in space. Steps
give shape to time, and they pace out the dimension of time, in that sense.
Only harmonic order allows this. Even the tone of a drum shapes time . 0

A crucial force of music - the harmonic interplay of tonal cohesion
and gravity - punctuates time with resolution and with metric and rhyth-
mic order. A crucial fact of musical art - the harmonic force (chordal or
melodic) - works its way upon the sense of hearing whether or not the
composer elects to shape this force for our ears or whether he remains
a naive foil to its unbridled power.

Briefly, the acquisition (intuitive and conscious) of harmonic princi-
ples began the art of building with time as surely as civil engineering
(also both intuitive and conscious) began the art of building with stone.
Now we can “build” aural and visual compositions for videodisc.

Today we apply harmonic laws to build visual structures. New
instruments modulate light more accurately and swiftly than musical in-
struments modulate air. Considering time-structured arts of the future,
we can create integral aural/ visual compositions in a domain of harmonic
continuity. A universally acceptable visual art - an equal partner to music
- is arriving hand in hand with current computer music developments.

With these twin developments there follows a change in prospects

*See Dedication, p. 1.

oVictor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol (New York, 1956), pp. 212-223.

16 On With the Revolution!

for music. Within this decade we will see that participants in search of
“new musical resources” produced unexpected results. A major task as-
sumed by a few composers at the opening of this century, beginning as a
search for new musical resources beyond classical harmony, ends in a
full-scale reevaluation of architectonic temporality of which - I submit -
the history of music is only the first chapter.

If, as is often charged against “modern music,” the wellsprings of
harmonic vitality ran dry about a decade or two into this century, then
perhaps all is about to flow once again, but now with complementary
aural and optical resources. The imaginations of many composers includ-
ing Scriabin, and painters, including Kandinsky, symbolize the ongoing
search, over many generations and with inadequate technology, to dis-
cover complementarity for eye and ear. Both Constructivism in art, seek-
ing a rapport with music, and modern trends in music, probing for a
way beyond its traditions by any and all means, will realize a kind of
consummation through this complementarity.

A composer may look forward to executing with his own hands an
aural/ visual creation. Using a new kind of versatile instrumentation and
compositional procedures, borrowing from computer programming and
editing practice, this new composer will enjoy the practicality of hands-
on execution of his own work.

In contrast to visual artists, immediate, direct intuitive contact with
his work was always the composer’s dilemma. Between composer and
his music “lurks” portentously - in triumph or for disaster - his in-
terpreter, soloist or ensemble. But now, digital instrumentation (the next
phase of computer technology in the arts) provides the capability to
modify, over and over, and reshape a composition without signal degen-
eration. In effect, a composer becomes the performer of his own creation
for better or for worse; this responsibility was traditionally assumed by
both the painter and sculptor without question.

When the instruments are available, composers will find a visual
medium hand in hand with the musical medium, both with the same
editing and viewing and reedit capabilities. This intimate sensuous
contact with his work creates a new role for composer-performer
in a way unprecedented in five hundred years of musical instrument
refinement.

Composers will discover a congruence of aural-visual partnership as
productive as that which they found for centuries in writing for combina-
tions of all kinds - keyboard, skin, string or wind. That partnership will
be grounded on valid harmonic interrelationships equally applicable to
sound and image. The creative product of these new composers will go
directly to the videodisc publisher.

I started this chapter with reference to myself, a media “revolution-
ary,” training underground for the day which is dawning even as I write
this book. It has been a long time coming. Early in the fifties, I believed
that this wondrous day had come - or would come next month, or next
year. In truth more than forty years have passed since the beginning of
my story. In the next chapter I shall begin at the beginning.

18 On With the Revolution!

Chapter II

Beginning

The geometry of iron rivets in iron plates painted white, the lines at the
edge of a plate, and the rolling, shifting shadow cast by all of these,
especially at the curve of a plate - I tried to film these fragments that I
saw in a cine camera viewfinder aboard a Rotterdam-bound freighter
during the summer of 1938. Fernand Leger or an artist at the Bauhaus
might have painted such geometry as I saw it through the eyepiece. But
my ideas were not like theirs - I didn’t know about them. I was trying to
compose music, not painting. I knew little about living painters, abstract
art, Arnold Schoenberg or what I was going to do with myself. Much
music had touched me, I knew that. And at my age, it seemed “schizoid”
to love music plus cameras and telescopes, but I did (I had ground a
mirror and built a telescope a few years earlier). I was frustrated with
college, so here I was, halfway to Europe where surely, I thought, I’d
find some sort of a worthwhile career and get started with my life.

The wonder is that I did “get started.” A year or two later I wrote a
friend that I had chosen art “and the lean way of life.” Bom in Califor-
nia, of parents fresh from the Midwest, I had never known anyone who
made money painting or writing poetry or music. Neither had Jackson
Pollock nor Mark Rothko, nor would they for many years to come. Yet
in fact I knew better than hundreds and hundreds of my contemporaries
that I wouldn’t make money with art. I knew I was beginning a career in
a kind of filmmaking that hadn’t been invented. Erroneously, I thought I
had invented the very idea of an abstract cinema art that would look the
way music sounded.

With viewfinder focused on the white iron shipboard structure, I had

thought to direct my camera by twisting and turning, and to “cut” from
one take to another in rhythmic ways. I had no story to tell. This was
composing “music” out of the motion of the camera. I had no intention
to bring back home movies of this trip to Rotterdam. The trip was not a
summer excursion; I had convinced my father it was a matter of some
serious business having to do with my education and future. As it turned
out, that film was unrhythmic and depressingly unmusical for a first ef-
fort designed to begin my search for a new art that would look the way
music sounds.

The summer in Europe ended in Paris where I lived until the follow-
ing summer. I attended two glorious performances of the entire set of
Beethoven string quartets during which my mind dwelt upon figurations
in space. I could agree with music critics of Europe’s nineteenth-century
flamboyant era, who wrote on and on about “liquid architecture.” I
visualized that. I began to be convinced that such liquidity could be
visualized - on film now - with twentieth-century art and technology.
What I needed was more filmmaking skill and a way to point my camera
at something that would not be as hopelessly static as that freighter’s
iron plate. This prospect tended to temper and rejuvenate me, deflated as
I was by the return from my single provocative year in Europe.

Alas, the whole world is a static place when you compare it with
Beethoven quartets! Then I learned that I hadn’t invented anything at all.
Even Leonardo had sketched ideas of music and its likeness to colors.
There had been more than one century of premature color-organ ex-
perimenters. Again I was disappointed. Worse yet, after returning home,

I learned that European filmmakers before me had made films which
they called symphonies, such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin , Symphony
of a City.*

*It is not clear in my memory whether these “symphonic” efforts or those hand-drawn animations
(meant to “illustrate” music) affected me most at this time. Between the mid-40s and the mid-50s, I
read about (and no doubt I viewed examples of) most of the body of this “musical” work — films
by Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Lotte Reiniger, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter,
Alexander Alexeieff, Mary Ellen Bute and Joris Ivens. All but Reiniger, Eggeling, Ruttmann and
Ivens have since become personal acquaintances. Any one of them would, I believe, share with me
the convictions expressed in this book, had they shared my experience with the late marvels of
computer graphics. For further information on these animators, see Robert Russett and Cecile Starr,
Experimental Animation (New York, 1976).

22 Beginning

I would have given up had I not known, in my youthful way of
dreaming as much as thinking, that they were all wrong. I wondered if
anyone else realized why every attempt at visualizing music had fallen
hopelessly short of being as dynamic as music. Pointing their cameras
at the world, all those “symphonists” inadvertently recorded the stasis
of the world, even as they filmed its busiest moments - its winds and
storms and birds and water and city traffic. Those films are not sym-
phonies, I thought, poetry perhaps, but not liquid architecture, not music.
I was charged with new excitement. I never debated my ability to find
my way beyond these transparent failures.

Those films were records of events on the surface of a gigantic body
(Earth) whose mass and gravitation permeate everything with the im-
mutable laws of motion. Not so with the motion of music. Its motions
range from cosmic proportions to a tiny flutter in a medium of such
fluidity that it seems to be unconstrained by inertia or gravity. I was
convinced that the eye should see what the ear perceived in that aural
cosmos. Obviously, I enjoyed the idea that I would find the way.

I had tried to transcend stasis by plying the stock-in-trade of the
movie camera, holding it in my hand while utilizing its own mobility on
shipboard. Yet the more the camera moved, the more the world’s gra-
tuitous motions, hither and yon, close up or distant, in front or behind,
gave way to one common slur in one direction, flattened in another. The
strongly spatial and multiplex polyphony of the real world gave way to
flat blur. I did not like that-- this was not as it should be. It was just not a
symphony. The optical equal of that deeply spatial experience of music
would have to be found elsewhere.

Found where? This question caused me to reflect upon the anatomy
of musical “abstraction.” There is no such thing as the harmonic organi-
zation of musical tone in nature. Occasionally a stone may ring like a
bell, birds pattern “song,” but there are few natural bells, fewer natural
flues where the winds sound organ tones. Even the whistle of wind is
eerie and non-musical. Patterning of musical tones is a man-made reality
of the aural world, universally accepted as such, but nowhere looked
upon as an abstraction that has been extracted (or abstracted) out of the
natural environment, nowhere regarded as a manifestation of the
environment.

Musical tones are a special creation. They are abstract only in the
sense that they are the raw material of the liquid architectonic structure
of music. On the other hand, wherever I pointed my camera, I failed to
discover that special quality of any material possessing the controllable
visual fluidity that I desired. No abstraction in my camera had the gen-
erative potential, the capability to propagate fluid patterns or especially,
the liquid variability of the intervalic families of musical tones.

Quite the contrary: pointing my camera anywhere resulted in record-
ing images of somewhere. If the camera’s record is unclear, blurred by
the smear of too fast panning or being out of focus, the sense of some-
where as place is simply flattened. The spatial content of an image is
flattened. The eye resists this attempt to domesticate abstraction. This
sort of deception hardly satisfies the eye, because the sense of being (or
seeing) somewhere is so strong. The eye is the natural master of pattern
recognition. The eye demands satisfaction by invoking in us strong
feelings of puzzlement. Our very eyes themselves ask, “What is it?’’
They strain to restore a blur to what it was supposed to be. Eye and
brain make these demands, even by inducing nausea in the viewer if his
sense of optical upright equilibrium is deceived on the screen.

I concluded that the eye will not passively accept a filmmaker’s
strategy when he assumes that, by obscuring the presence of place in the
world, and by some gestural motion with his camera, the viewer will be
“transported,” purposely, somewhere else, into a world of abstraction.

I found that abstractions, so derived, possess no power to communicate
anything except what I judged to be arbitrary formlessness even if that
formlessness is shaped into some imposed pattern. I observed that “com-
posing” camera motions in my shipboard film, for example, produced
none of the potential of a generative grammar, as do musical tones. It
was clear to me, tones possess remarkable generative potential, else
their productive utility might have been exhausted in, say the eleventh-
century. Tones are not shaped by the composer; he finds the shape in the
tones and thereby discovers their generative potential.

Moreover music is not an abstracted picture of anything. When
Debussy painted (or composed) La Mer, pictures of the sea had little to
do with his flute and bassoon figurations. Still, these soft meditations are

24 Beginning

evocative and just as lovely as the sea itself.* Why? Why do they move
us as intensely as do childhood memories? And then, what of other feel-
ings? What of the interior emotions evoked by the quartets of Beethoven?
Overwhelming as they are, obviously these examples of “pure” music,
these too, consist simply of figurations of tone and intensity. Yet how
can musical patterns of an instrument or voice impact so profoundly
upon one’s feelings?

I became obsessed and charmed with such thoughts about the art of
music - rhythm and harmony - and why just twelve tones were infinitely
applicable. I began to explore ideas of creating structures of visual pat-
tern. I commenced a search for the simplest building block, an alphabet,
with which to construct an art of vision to match the art of music.

I was pleased to find that a hero discovered during my year in
Europe should now provide the hint, or model, for the next chapter in
my life. Arnold Schoenberg’s principles of twelve-tone composition,
while bearing only the most superficial similarities to my optical design
problems, still influenced my film projects over the following years.

During my winter in Paris I had been instructed in some of the basic
principles of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serial composing. Incompletely,

I understood that a series or row of tones is constructed so that it can be
transposed, retrogressed and inverted, forming an extensive array from
which to draw all figurations of an entire composition. I did not under-
stand that these techniques, more or less, were practiced by the Flemish
polyphonists of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries - and later by Bach.

My concept of the tone row, subjected to these transpositions, inver-
sions and retrogressions, seemed readily adaptable to a film sequence.
Figuratively, but not in fact, I could translate tone-row to filmstrip. I
learned only very slowly and reluctantly that what I presumed to be the
new musical art of “atonalism” meant not the abandonment of harmonic
principles but their reassertion outside established conventions in new
ways and with new force. My filmstrips displayed not the least sugges-
tion of any effect parallel to the harmonic forces at work within the
musical tone row.

*See Leonard Bernstein's analysis of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in The Unanswered Question
(Cambridge, 1976), p. 153 ff.

Subtle intervalic interrelationships alter as the tone row is transposed
up or down the twelve note positions just as in an earlier century a
melody was altered by transposition into another key. They reform again
by inversion or retrogression; all of this causes shifting and changing of
the harmonic tensions and cohesions throughout. An image sequence
seems to be well suited to the idea that it be inverted or mirrored. Any
image, so treated, does suggest interesting symmetries. But it took a long
while to comprehend that no visual action juxtaposed any way against
itself, strung out sequentially as a (musical) variation upon itself, or cut
into fragmentary figures for contrapuntal use - none of these had the
impact that shifting harmonic forces do. In sum, no visual motion worked
the way musical motion works.

It seemed I hadn’t the slightest comprehension of the vast power of
the workings of harmonic force in music. Why should I? I agreed with
contemporary composer-friends (Cage and others) who discredited clas-
sical harmony and tonality with revolutionary zeal. Some of those even
had a mind to “elevate” a protesting Arnold Schoenberg (grossly mis-
cast) to the role of their vanguard leader. They were as misinformed as
I of Schoenberg’s true concepts but, by that time, I had begun to suspect
that Cage and Schoenberg were as far apart as the earth and the most
distant planet.

My best effort to apply Schoenberg’s principles to film was not suc-
cessful, not understood; nor was it ever properly analyzed. Instead, my
attention passed from these inadequacies to a blanket rejection of pre-
vailing ideas on the art of cinema. Film was not the technological art
that would bring about a satisfying visualization of that liquid architec-
ture as I had believed.

The movie camera was, after all, only a recording machine, good for
documentation or drama. How could a reproducing instrument serve to
contribute to a new visual art, any more than, say, a sound-recording
machine might contribute to the art of music? (This was before the inven-
tion of the magnetic tape recorder which, for a short time, was indeed
looked on as an instrument for composition.) Fortunately this sobering
realization sent me searching ahead toward a single-handed effort to in-
vent a machine that would be used as an instrument for composing

26 Beginning

this liquid architecture.*

It was only after a decade of effort in another direction (with some
compensating rewards along the way) that my tone-row/ film-row ex-
perimental failures were clarified by a deeper understanding. More about
this follows in Chapter III.

*See Appendix, p. 183.

Chapter III

Concept

My earliest joy with building things had grown from telescopes to
cinema. But with my final disillusionment regarding cinema came a chal-
lenge to return to constructing a different kind of instrument for creating
the visual fluidity which I foresaw. There followed about ten years of
the most gratifying work. I patented an invention. I earned a reputation
in professional motion picture circles as a pioneer in the development
of slit-scan techniques and motion control systems. But in the end,

I concluded that I was hardly a step closer to the visual fluidity which
I desired*

My conclusion was wrong. With mystical inadvertency, while pursu-
ing my delight with obsolete but top quality ballistics control mechanisms
(convertible into devices for generating visual fluidity), I discovered
the computer. Moreover, my skill with these World War II analog prob-
lem solving machines, and a film 0 I had produced with the conversions,
demonstrated a respectable command of analog computer graphic
technology. IBM executives acknowledged this with a generous and ex-
tended series of research grants to pursue my quest for visual fluidity on
a big computer.

To review briefly, I thought that any visual art, structured in time,
would need some generative building block - an alphabet or scale. I
asked repeatedly what visual elementals might match the scales of tones
of music with which numberless musical constructs can be created, or the

*See Appendix, p. 183.

° See my film Catalog, and Appendix, p. 167.

alphabets by which an infinity of ideas is constructed. Now that I was free
to explore, I soon found that for the first time in history, visual periodicity
and harmonics were accessible to dynamic manipulation through the
instrument of computer graphics. These provided the clue to the follow-
ing events.*

Of course, elaborate patterns of repetition and rhythm have been
drawn, woven or chiseled into borders and decorations of all kinds since
early ages. Considering arts techniques from the broad perspective of the
present, I observed that the best “computer art” did not compare well
with lacework from Belgium made a century ago. But the computer
possessed a unique capability of making very complex pattern flow. One
could plan exacting and explicit patterns of action and distinctive
motions as intricate as lace, but in a way no Belgian lace maker would
ever imagine.

I concluded that through digital constructions of pattern, harmonic
considerations might provide the basis for a graphic art of motion. I also
concluded that this power of the computer to liquefy pattern, allowing
complex design to flow with control, more than justified the difficulties
of computer technology, Finally, I determined that the relationships of
sight and sound would be served best if it were possible to compose
both components of an aural /visual work within some common aes-
thetic such as harmony would offer. All these potentialities lay before
me, gathered within the central processor of any big computer with
appropriate peripheral attachments.

A question remained: What computer, whose computer? Despite the
continuing annual renewal of grants from IBM, I envisioned a time
when, by the rapid growth of the electronics industry and the diminution
of the size and cost of the components, I might own my own computer.
However, for the present, despite the generosity of my sponsor, my work
at computer facilities was assigned the lowest priority. I longed for a
workable relation with the world of technology other than by intermit-
tent, short-term grants of support.

At some time in the mid-sixties ad hoc committees within the art
world were being formed to sponsor art and technology. I was im-

*See Appendix, p. 167, and Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York, 1970).

30 Concept

mediately elated; my creative needs might be recognized and fulfilled.
Then, just as quickly, I was discouraged by obtuse, confused or empty
attitudes that developed among people of influence. Excitement grew
over projects that were formulated with bandwagon haste around this
subject. As a fad that came and went, along with so many others of that
decade, the art /technology “boom” left in its wake as much prejudice as
enlightenment.

The distribution of misunderstanding remained unchanged by all that
effort on the part of artists, scientists, art museum curators and educa-
tors. Claes Oldenburg’s gigantic icebag was perhaps a truer symbol than
anyone guessed. The curious effort to co-mingle a few artists with a few
huge corporations produced some exotic headaches. Of many art/ philo-
sophical projects undertaken to deal with the impact of technology upon
the modem world, few were more ineffectual. By contrast, the Bauhaus,
a school with a similar philosophy of technology and art, and similar
influence upon the public, continues to grow as a subject of books and
exhibitions around the world.

Over the centuries, the keyboard and other musical instruments were
developed through a genuine cooperation between the fields of art and
technology. This makes the recent project’s failure to shape more favor-
able attitudes especially unfortunate, just when technologist and artist
could have been collaborating, for example, on the instrumentation of
electronic aural/visual arts and especially the dynamic control of video
color phosphors. Of course, it remains a matter of greater importance that
some deeper reconciliation and cooperation between art and science
establish itself within this epoch.

Along with this neglect of many real issues of art and technology,
there flourished the widespread fear of the computer as Golem and
personal fears of being “folded, rolled, misplaced or spindled.” These
misapprehensions are still common. Many doubtful views became per-
manently fixed after the art and technology grants were distributed. It
was, conspicuously, a period of “cybernetic wrongheadedness.”

With regard to the use of the computer as an instrument for art,
misunderstanding afflicted both extremes. Some looked upon the com-
puter as an anathema capable only of sterile mechanization. Others
believed the computer needed only to be “trained right” in order to take

over art productions.

At this time, a popular and misguided attitude (which may be related
to Duchamp or the intellectual interests in the I Ching) led to a kind of
rage for randomness, chance and change. Computers were somehow
believed to be superb “calculators” of random numbers (a hopeless con-
tradiction) and in turn, random numbers were believed to have mystical
power with art (a serious possibility). With striking “logic” this favorite
collegiate notion grew: that poetry and music, “just about everything”
could be created with computers by using random numbers.

In the early seventies, a sizeable contingent of East Coast artists,
intent on new careers, arrived at a West Coast institution because it
looked as though the best opportunities with computers and technology
and lasers (especially lasers) were at a new California “Bauhaus.” Soon
they were gone again. All this new technology, for these practicing art-
ists, presented a choice between the raw and the cooked; they elected not
to struggle with such unpalatabilities.

The early sixties had seen the beginning of a less transient movement
of sorts, having to do with filmmaking as an individual artist’s move-
ment - underground. Here, as later with the art and technology mix (or
mixup), I was both invited in and invited out of the activities. While the
existence of an American film avant-garde was acknowledged, including
a peculiarly West Coast contingent (my brother and I were members
of the abstract branch) all was soon subsumed by New York.

There, in New York, film societies and spokesmen in both the press
and books, were doing everything possible to recreate the atmosphere of
Europe in the twenties. For a short part of that decade, in Paris and
Berlin, some of the best artists, composers, poets and critics joined in
what seems like a one-of-a-kind effort: to implant the artistic standard of
their time into a very young technological film art.

The European effort was soon abandoned and in the New York of
the sixties, it was never appreciated by the vanguard of American artists,
composers, poets or critics. The idea remained always “beneath” the
avant-garde. This particular idea of film artist - distinguished from actor
or director of commercial movies - was taken up by a group that derived
satisfaction from its self-relegation to an underground. It became an un-
derground of film, filmmaker and audience. The underground audience

32 Concept

grew large because a few underground films shortly became synonymous
with pioneering acts of sex, underclothed (without even a stitch of under-
clothes). Despite prudish outrage, this underground had its measure of
success; it influenced the commercial motion pictures’s way with sex
and it even initiated a few of commercial television’s rarely interesting
new ways with design.

Yet to this day the idea of an independent artist’s cinema remains
ill-defined. There was hardly a movement, and the struggle to define one
continues. It could be defined, of course, only by the existence of art
works possessing the distinction of self-definition. The designation of
film classic cannot be bestowed upon a film by a few writers, however
much effort they commit to that end. Some work may achieve distinc-
tion. But it is too late to define an independent artist’s cinema movement.
The very depletion of silver resources and the sheer economics of film
production, in competition with newer technologies, is bound to pre-
clude that idea. What shall follow in its place? It will not be Polavision.

It will be video.

It is video that renders the intermittent silver ribbon obsolete. Com-
mercial film makers of course will follow their own destiny but the per-
sonal or independent “film artist’’ will surely abandon the film camera
soon. All the projected sprocket holes, the dust and editing mechanics,
lovingly incorporated into structuralist concepts of a generative grammar
that derives from the materials of the media itself - all that will soon be
relegated to the archives of museums. Selecting technical impedimenta
of cinema, contrived deliberately for their films as a kind of self-
conscious signing or symbology of the medium, fails to fulfill the
function of a generative grammar. This class of film will seem rather
quaint on future videodiscs.*

A tacit assumption of both the art /technology and cinema under-
ground activities devolves from ideas of the generative grammar. Noam
Chomsky has asked the two pertinent questions: first, can new grammars
be synthesized and second, are music and art rightly, languages? As far
as I can discover, he has answered neither question. I believe, of course,

*Regina Cornwell, “Progress - Discontinuous," Artforum , April, 1980, p. 60.
J. Hoberman, "The Cinema of Structure," American Film, June, 1980, p. 12.

there are ways to initiate a new language and a new grammar, but little
in the contemporary arts leads us far in that direction. Little as I know
about current efforts in this subject in Europe or the United States, I do
observe a nimble disposition among the self-styled structuralist film-
makers and the structuralist theoreticians in Europe. Structuralism’s sub-
sumption of information-theory was breathtaking; with these theoreti-
cians, at least, it would seem that theory is mercurial.

Painting in this century discovered its structural elementals and its
alphabet beneath its own burdensome impedimenta of style, representa-
tion and tableaux. Painting’s basic structural elements proved to be,
more or less, surface (canvas, support), pigment, shape, line and texture.
For a decade, a coterie of cinema artists has strained to imitate their
cousins, the painters, by creating their own dogma of structualist funda-
mentals for cinema - which turned out to be sprocket holes and such
signing, signals and symbols of the technology. I abandoned cinema as a
particular tool, seeking to create motion out of the basic elements of any
graphic art - color, line, shape - consciously composing every detail of
the frame area and, by transforming the details from frame to frame, to
compose motion forward in time. This approach contrasts with the ac-
cepted editing practice of cinema (which merely splices given sums of
frames) and it contrasts with accepted filming practice (which must
arbitrarily film those frames). Neither practice modifies its own fixed
“givens” which are preset and arbitrary, more or less. Neither cinema
process can touch what should be the inner structural elementals of a
visual art of motion.

Nor can we touch the structural elementals of a visual art of motion
(based upon criteria that will be defined within this book) through tech-
niques of animation. For example, neither the hand nor the eye can
manipulate, or simply keep count of, the hundreds upon hundreds of ele-
ments which move in accountable order and true orbital “counterpoint”
in my own recent films, however “cool,” “minimal” or “hard edged”
some may wrongfully define my work. To deal with periodicity through
digital harmonic structures, as outlined in this book, computer graphics
are essential.

The problems of creating new grammar where none exists remain
comprehensive and involve mysterious aesthetic norms. Basic assump-

34 Concept

tions need to be revised, but few persons recognize this. When an ambi-
tious would-be artist elects to start afresh among the fields of scientific
technologies, he starts fresh, after his art school training. So it was with
independent filmmakers. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill (the artist)
once more: Never before had so many elected to fly such difficult flying
machines with so few flying lessons. The few safe landings and the
carnage were both predictable.

It is not the time and this is not the place for summarizing this
activity in the arts, especially technology’s arts, over the past twenty or
thirty years. These matters are never summarized well and this is, least
of all, my responsibility. The framework of my ideas has passed from
collisions with technology and collisions with many attitudes presuming
to deal with art and technology, to a serene perspective on both the perils
and rewards of new instruments and instrumentalities for music and art.

Yet my aspirations have been consistent since that shipboard tussle
with my visionary glimpse of music in the viewfinder on the high seas
bound for Rotterdam. Whether I have found a valid grammar rooted in
late twentieth-century technology remains to be seen. These first chapters
have provided background for what is to follow. I submit the remainder
of this book for its suggestions regarding the novel idea of a new
grammar and for an art that looks like music. This new grammar must
speak to us as eloquently as music or fail its very reason for existence.

Chapter IV

The Problem:

How Shall Motion Pattern Time?

The Raft of the Medusa , a painting by Theodore Gericault is a tableau of
disaster, a scene of pandemonium: under turbulent sky and a thrashing
sea, survivors struggle just to remain upon the pitching topsides of a
gigantic raft, or to aid one another while some slip under the waves even
as the distant rescue vessel is in sight. No spare surface within the can-
vas is untouched by violent motion and emotion. Nevertheless, Jackson
Pollock’s fields of abstraction are of an order that would imply still
greater activity. His gestural act of painting produces a surface of three-
dimensional turbulence. Where, in art, do you find more motion than
this? And what is the nature and function of motion in all art? What are
the relations of motion and emotion?

A quest for answers to questions such as these led me to study the
nature of time and motion in prior visual arts dealing with the visual
elements that contribute to a singular design. A painting, regardless of
implicit dynamics, still exists passively fixed in time. But a new art
might pattern action in time with all elements in motion at all times. The
graphic problem, then, will be how to manipulate a field of visual
elements so that all parts will contribute purposely to some temporal
(time-structured) design.

In this era, preoccupations with action painting, process in art, serial-
ization, pattern, optical phenomena, color fields and light itself, all sig-
nificantly reflect intensified concern with problems of the dynamics of
painting* Within the community of visual artists, few painters since Kan-

* Popper, Kinetic Art; and Rickey, Constructivism.

dinsky have remained indifferent to the problem of “time” and “motion”
in their still medium. Yet most remained uninterested or innocent of the
knowledge that technology lately could provide the possibility of
working with real time and real motion; hence their concern with the
dynamics of their static medium is in one sense outmoded. The distant
rescue vessel figuratively will never arrive in Gericault’s canvas drama.

“As a tone in itself is not yet a melody, so a chord in itself is not yet
harmony . . . Music is motion - tonal motion as melody - chordal motion as
harmony.”* “A note - A, B, C, D, and so on - has no meaning in itself;
it is just a note. It is the combination of the notes which can create mu-
sic .” 0 These are truisms about music, but for me they are more: they pos-
sess certain fragments of insight with which to approach the problem
of visual motion.

An early intuition about how to control total dynamics led me to
activate all graphic elements through a motion function that advances
each element differentially. For example, if one element were set to
move at a given rate, the next element might be moved two times that
rate. Then the third would move at three times that rate and so on. Each
element would move at a different rate and in a different direction
within the field of action. So long as all elements obey a rule of direction
and rate, and none drifts about aimlessly or randomly, then pattern con-
figurations form and reform. This is harmonic resonance, and it echoes
musical harmony, stated in explicit terms. I tried this procedure in
several films, and was gratified by the consistency of the confirmation
it demonstrated. 1=1

Ironically, multiplane animation - the only other differential function
ever applied to graphics - is a leap in reverse, because it actually serves
to fixate an illusion of the stasis of the natural world by a trick that
gives realistic looking differential motions to foreground, middleground
and background. Gericault’s various paintings of violence and action
show that motion depicted as an event upon this earth is of an order
quite different from the conception of motion in the mind’s eye, for
example, as implied in the turbulent abstractions of Jackson Pollock. At

* Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol (New York, 1956), p. 109.
o Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York, 1979), p. 52.
□ See the films which are illustrated in Figures (6)— (12), pp. 75-80.

38 Problem - How Shall Motion Pattern Time?

the same time, a look at the “real world” demonstrates the static relation-
ship of foreground and background, and the static relation of mountain
to sea, tree to house, regardless of the activity thereabout.

My early intuition about the problem was correct in visualizing a
field of action as Gestalt patterns of moving elements and not as a stage
upon which motion events occur. Traditional pattern is constructed from
a repertoire of elements. For example, lattices, Islamic mosaics and bor-
ders are patterns constructed from elements - stitches, tiles, bricks, beads
or brush strokes. The problem of motion, then, directed my attention
from the idea of merely rendering an overall landscape as a static stage
for motion. I thought to borrow from these traditional practices of pat-
tern construction. I thought of the rhythm of pattern. So, as if they were
pattern rhythms in actual motion, I conceived of ways to manipulate a
series, family or scale of elements, each with its own action potential.
The problem of motion is less like painting landscape and more like
herding sheep, or hedgehogs, as in Alice’s croquet.

Continuing to study the problem by comparing prior arts, I asked
myself: what are the essential components of time and temporal organi-
zation in poetry, dance and music? Metrical order is an important part
of the structure of poetry as it is important to harmonic structure of
music. Pitch pattern and rhythmic pattern are interrelated and interwoven
in music just as syllabic, rhythmic pattern and meaning interweave
in poetry.

Twentieth-century art, poetry and music again and again have
breached the thoroughly codified rules of meter and harmony. Still, a
latter-day ambivalence emerges, perhaps to reign. “The king is dead.
Long live the king!” could become a refreshing idea. A late twentieth-
century attitude might claim that meter is dead; long live meter! Stravin-
sky pronounced that harmony is dead; he might have added - long
live harmony! Perhaps an end is near to the tiresome reaction against all
nineteenth-century giants in the arts and their academies. Within the
earliest decades of this century, Dada did a job that was needed. But
recent reaction in art - anti-art, anti-meter, John Cage’s effort to prove
that even a squeaking chair knows structure and is therefore “music” -
all of this has grown ever more tedious and inappropriate.

Nearly everyone senses the presence or absence of meter. Regarding

meter and rhythm: “Both are always present simultaneously - the
uniformity of the wave, the variegated pattern of durations, of long and
short, in the actual succession of tones. Both together make up the
rhythm of our music - not the succession of longer and shorter tones as
such, but their succession supported, borne along by, the rise and fall of
the continuing metric wave.’’* Reducing to these words what is instantly
felt by the vast majority of mankind (especially the young child) hints
at the unfathomable subtlety of the perceptual processes at work within
the metrical patterning of time.

Despite seconds and minutes, time is not naturally marked into units;
and despite motion picture frames, motion is not broken into static frame
units. “We cannot draw boundary lines on a wave; one wave passes
into another without a break.’’ 0 My quest for understanding intensified
my struggle with seemingly simple problems such as how the mechani-
cal demarcations of frames can be reconciled with the variability of
musical rhythm.

I tried to define and manipulate arrays of graphic elements, intending
to discover their laws of harmonic relationships. I hoped to sketch the
outline of a foundation for metrical order. Early efforts to deal with this
problem employed differential functions applied to the motions of
each of the elements, as noted above; but other problems radiated in all
directions around my primary suppositions.

Overwhelmed by the erudition of musical textbook detail and tech-
nique and humbled by my floundering with the staggering graphic
problems, nevertheless, I started at last to make some progress. A bench-
mark was reached when I began to apprehend the relationship of the
three terms: differential, resonance and harmony. First, motion
becomes pattern if objects move differentially. Second, a resolution to
order in patterns of motion occurs at points of resonance. And third, this
resolution at resonant events, especially at the whole number ratios,
characterizes the differential resonant phenomena of visual harmony . D

* Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, p. 171.
o Zuckerkandl, p. 170.

□ Looking back upon my experience of this “rite of initiation," I wonder if the composer him-
self might gain insight were he, too, able to look beyond orthodox harmony into this unconditionally
unorthodox view of the Pythagorian "physics" which transcends particularity to define, in the broad-
est generalized sense, the harmony, namely the resonances of differential periodicity.

40 Problem - How Shall Motion Pattern Time?

I had discovered the many significant meanings of the word resolve.
Among the eighteen numbered definitions in my dictionary are, “to make
a firm decision about,” “to find a solution to,” “to deal with conclu-
sively,” “release,” or this sixteenth item in the dictionary: “Music, to
progress from dissonance to a consonance.” What is more definitive than
“release” of tension? What else than “to find a solution to?” What else
than exactly what I found in my visual harmonic resonances? This re-
solve at a resonant event dissipates tension. Dissonance reaches conso-
nance at any moment of resonance. All this is exactly as visible as it is
audible. I felt that this was to be a profound discovery.

It followed that if moments of resonance resolve tension, certain fac-
tors must be at work as complementary forces to build tension. Though I
little understood the details, it seemed clear I had discovered a clue to a
force-field of visual perception. What I knew about music confirmed
for me that emotion derives from the force-fields of musical structuring
in tension and motion. Structured motion begets emotion. This, now, is
true in a visual world, as it is a truism of music.

My search for a scale or alphabet was stimulated at this time by
Noam Chomsky’s book, Language and Mind. There I read, almost as a
fact incidental to the point of his writing, a quotation from the text of the
Port Royal Grammar, a seventeenth-century view of language: “. . . [we]
make infinite use of finite means [with our alphabet] . . . that marvelous
invention by which we construct from twenty-five or thirty sounds an
infinity of expressions.”*

It was not at all clear what might constitute the computer’s graphic
“alphabet.” Yet Chomsky’s brief history of the devious directions taken
in a search for an understanding of the origins and the nature of language
stimulated my endeavor, where perhaps the very scope of that search
should have been discouraging. I felt wiser and derived confidence
in my own quest, having learned of the succession of wrong turns and
blind alleys that have already been taken in classic scientific studies.
Chomsky’s description of a major turn in a wrong direction that was
pursued for more than a century by a large faction of linguists led me to
wonder if a considerable faction of composers in this century might have

*Noam Chomsky. Language and Mind (New York, 1968), p. 18.

taken a similar turn in some wrong directions.

I sensed that Chomsky’s concept of the deep structure of language
applied almost miraculously to music * The details did not seem impor-
tant. I was encouraged just to know that there was speculation about
“innate human dispositions” in regard to our speech competence. There-
fore it appeared to me that musical dispositions must surely follow. I
entertained the outrageous presumption of leaping beyond all constraint
of logic to conceive a visual world of harmony to which there must be
innate human responses, just as in the aural world of music.

Reflecting further, I observed that language, this greatest and most
complex intellectual achievement of collective mankind, came to us
“naturally,” so to speak. Nobody, no committee planned a babel of
tongues. In fact, efforts to synthesize, improve upon or even redirect the
development of any language have always floundered. (French gram-
marians have merely struggled against “Franglais.”) Whatever parallels
exist between language and music are bound to include the probability
that music, too, would defy synthesis by plan or committee - or by
myself, of course. Such thoughts somewhat tempered my reflections on
the very idea of innovation in art.

Yet I began to discover the dynamics of graphic pattern arrays and
their harmonic interrelationships. I began to detect the subtle charge and
discharge of tension related to order/disorder dynamics in these arrays.
The problem now seemed to define itself in such terms. I was beginning
to conceive of the basis for a graphic “scale” evolving from harmonies,
and I saw that here was a way beyond the monolithic emotional stasis of
so much abstract film and video with which I was familiar.

For years, I had detested a quality of stasis that permeated and spoiled
a broad variety of pattern in motion compositions. Video wallpaper or
video- Valium are two of the more popular “expletives” used frequently
with no slight derision to express what I had observed. The emo-
tional blandness of these films derives from a pattern of movement
that neither gathers nor discharges tension. Many films exhibit total
ignorance of the function of tension. Forces at work in an image moving

*In the first three chapters of The Unanswered Question , Leonard Bernstein grasped the metaphor
in deep-structure of linguistics vis a vis music much as I did.

42 Problem - How Shall Motion Pattern Time?

without purpose cancel one another. This becomes a ludicrous stand-off
of force/counterforce, an equilibrium of pointlessness even while the
screen may boil with activity. Now it was obvious: only structured
motion begets emotion.

The composer - mindlessly, intuitively or with careful deliberation
- concatenates one element of harmonic cohesion onto another and
another. And so he builds structures which literally lead us by the ear
along a pathway of emotional continuity. I became acutely aware that
these forces prevail whether classical harmony or “atonal” musical con-
structions were involved. With insight transformed since my earliest
filmstrip experiments, I now grasped the pervasive function of harmony:
I could feel harmonic forces either working or failing to work in every
graphic dynamic, whether the motion had been structured knowingly
or not.

Now I objected to the word “abstract” because it serves to misdirect
emphasis onto the object that moves and so to obscure the idea of mo-
tion as dynamic pattern. Dynamics interested me in the sense that music
is motion, tonal motion, chordal motion. Here, abstraction is not at
issue. Any image must be an ephemeral conveyance of patterns of mo-
tion. Within their limits of mass and inertia, dancers also perform
“musical” patterns of motion, and of course the human body is hardly
an abstraction.

My early distress with “film symphonies” came to mind. The deter-
mination to find a more fluid vision than was possible by using a cine
camera pointed at the world (rivets in iron plate on the high sea) con-
tinued as the subject of much reflection. By contrast the recurring res-
onant events with computed differential structures of elements in motion
were producing valid, generative and fluid patterns. I was satisfied that
here was the beginning of an architecture of motion that might be made
to blossom the way musical architectonic pattern blossomed, in the
Baroque era for instance.

At the same time as I gained new control of fluid graphic harmony,
some composers in search of new musical resources were beginning to
compose with magnetic tape and electronic synthesizers; but their
“new” compositions were often immobilized through loss of harmonic
structural control. Mono-melodic, sustained tones and tiresome slow

motions became cliches that often dominated electronic music from
mid-twentieth century onward.

It seemed, ironically, as if their loss was my gain. Just as my new
way beyond stasis of the graphic field through applied harmonics came
into view, many electronic music composers seemed to lose touch with
harmonic fundamentals and dynamic pattern and seemed to lose dexter-
ity of figuration. The natural fluidity of music seemed to thicken to
molasses, in their aural electronic world.

On the other hand, as my graphic elements progressed through one
point of resonance or through a fraction of a harmonic cycle, motion was
indeed patterned. When, infrequently, one of the sequences in my har-
monic films was composed effectively, the results of these resonances or
this cycling, were characterized by a diversity of rise and fall of tension,
of highs and lows of tension, and a metrical rhythm and order such
as we expect and receive everywhere within the vast diversity of pre-
electronic music.

Among other practical considerations these observations resulted in a
decision. For the time being, I elected to put aside the musical problem
as it bore upon my own long-term plans while I would concentrate upon
new prospects for optical differential dynamics. I would settle for
whatever music I might find for each new graphic composition since my
optical studies were the immediate challenge.

Clearly, the study of electronic and computer musical potentials
would be far more generously endowed than my graphic work. At uni-
versities and electronic music centers around the world, long established
funding of music studies had been generous. Investment in the newest
electronic instruments went on and on despite a new-to-obsolete life
cycle of about three years, throughout the past thirty years.

With a plan and a perspective upon the past and a sense of future,
the direction of my life work was now clarified. Here is a summary of
the problem as I found it:

Music, as the true model of temporal structure, is most worthy of
study among prior arts. Music is the supreme example of movement be-
come pattern. Music is time given sublime shape. If for no other reason
than its universality and its status in the collective mind, music invites
imitation. A visual art should give the same superior shape to the temporal

44 Problem - How Shall Motion Pattern Time?

order that we expect of music. As with the twenty-six elements of the
alphabet, music’s hierarchical pattern of tones provide the model for a
visual art with which to “make infinite use of finite means” to construct
“architecture.”

The unassailable fact remains that a work whose principal dimension
is time must faultlessly reckon with time. The only way we can deal
with time is to construct along time’s dimension. There are ways to give
shape to time’s rule upon human experience. This means that there are
ways to anticipate the next moment and to gratify expectations raised by
the moment just past; for example, in the human experience of music,
expectations do arise moment by moment. As listeners, we are engaged
in a musical intercourse with the composer. How we engage him, and
are engaged in turn by the composer, marks the very life of the matter
of music.

The problem, then, of a visual art of motion centers on that same
vital engagement. The dialogue between composer and whoever responds
to his work is tied somehow to a give and take, step for step in time.

This is what we mean by “giving shape to time.” “Music is temporal
art in the special sense that in it, time reveals itself to experience.”*
Otherwise time is shapeless or mechanical or lifeless, or time is fixed
into catatonic rigidity.

*ZuckerkandI, Sound and Symbol, p. 200.

Chapter V

The Instrument

Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

The following is a description of an instrument capable of producing
patterns of movement of visual elements within a graphic pattern field.
These movement structures derive from the changing harmonic relation-
ships of elements that move within a two- or three-dimensional field.
This instrument provides a composer with a means to compose a visual
art of movement pattern whose primary structural dimension is time.

A composition may be stored on film, video tape, disc or other stor-
age means. It may be played out in real time to a laser deflector or video
projection means for a “live” performance. Music is a logical “accom-
paniment” and color is an important parameter with any of these proce-
dures. The training and skill required of the composer may be compared
with that of his musical counterpart. One version of the instrument
would include a digital music composing capability in order to facilitate
composition of aural/ visual interrelationships.

We know the audio spectrum extends from, say, 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
Upon this field, numerous musical scales of all cultures are mapped in
various steps of harmonic ratio. We can imagine a scale of steps in one
dimension from low to high. A visual analogy of this one-dimensional
musical spectrum might be a two-dimensional coordinate field with
20,000 X by 20,000 Y coordinate units.

Let us try to visualize this field. Without considering what the object
might be, we could move “something” from the lower left to upper right
in this two-dimensional, imaginary field, as music moves from low to
high. Or the movement could follow the pathways of the conductor’s
baton or hands as he directs the music. Of course, the bouncing ball

touching each word of the song, reading left to right as the music moves
in time, is an old sing-along game of the early movies that is suggestive
of these motions.

Throughout a century of color organ experiments and even more
frequently since the invention of the oscilloscope, would-be music/
image innovators have attempted to invent a device with which to play
color “musically” on this two-dimensional field. Many minds have con-
trived to associate the rise and fall of melody with the upper and lower
regions of this field and thereon to lay out visual “scales.”*

As a functional playing ground for a visual analogue of the musical
spectrum, this simplistic idea is invalid. Only vaguely do we associate
musical scales with “up or down,” and we seldom associate tonal
motion with action to the left or right.

Again we may consider the conductor: There is no exact correspon-
dence of the motions of his hands with the rise and fall of musical pitch
even though there must be some kind of relationship between the music
and his stressful actions; Not all that energy is an act for the benefit of
the audience behind him. Otherwise he would communicate only tempo
to the orchestra members by standing before them, flailing the air, as it
seems. A further discussion of this subject occurs later.

The instrument proposed here is based upon a different scaling prin-
ciple which is mapped onto its own field in a manner that avoids the
questionable up-down, or left-right analogy. The scale ascends, as do the
musical scales, but not “up” and “down” either X or Y field coordinates.

The scaling principle is crucial to understanding the nature of this
instrument. Some discussion will be required to grasp the functions
which generate graphic pattern by differential motion. This type of mo-
tion pattern was inconceivable before the computer made possible the
control of visual periodic pattern. Therefore a description of differential
motion pattern will follow. The diagrams on page 50 Figure (1) are for
this purpose. 0

Given 60 points set in a row, as in Column A - Frame 1, move
point #1 one step up, point #2 two steps up, point #3 three steps up,

*See Chapter II, p. 22 (Reference to animator's attempts to “illustrate" music).

o See Chapter XII for a detailed description of the programming needed to produce these

illustrations.

48 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

and so on to point #60 which is moved sixty steps upward. Frame 2
shows these moves. Frame 3 shows point #1 moved two steps, #2 four
steps, #3 six steps, etc. Frames 4 through 9 continue this simple prog-
ress. At Frame 9, point #1 has moved eight steps upward while point
#60 has moved 480 steps (8x60).

This action sequence is the simplest example of a differential motion
pattern. I stress motion pattern because the motion itself is patterned
significantly. Although the static image on the page is pattern too, it is
the pattern of movement exclusively that matters. As the following
columns hint, the potential for pattern by differential motion is widely
variable.

Column B is an application of differential motion to a line of points
at various radii of a polar coordinate layout. Point #1 is at the mean
radius. Point #60 is at the extreme radius of a circular polar coordinate
field. Again, as in the first example, the horizontal line of points are
moved in incremental steps derived from their number, 1 through 60.

In this column, progress of the movement is merely clockwise around
the circular field, starting at three o’clock instead of upward as in
Column A. Column B, Frames 2 through 9, show how the identical rule
of Column A produces a different pattern.

Column D is an application of this differential motion to an array of
triangles which demonstrates that the principle applies to any set of ele-
ments, not just points. The triangles are graduated in size and located
in superimposed position initially. Otherwise the differential rule of
movement according to each one’s number is the same as in columns A
and B. In this instance 24 triangles are moved differentially around a
common circle, with clockwise motion from twelve o’clock.

This is the differential principle which is applied in various ways to
all motion of typical scales of an hypothetical instrument. Any scale
ascends a ladder of tensional structure in the time dimension. The pro-
gressive rise and fall of tension, which I might call the force-field pattern
of a structure, is characterized by recurrent nodes, where tension is
resolved to equilibrium (resonance). This attribute of tension, within any
differentially dynamic structure, will be described at length later and
with more illustrations.

For now, one further detail to consider: were Column B continued for

A B C D E

50 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

the proper number of steps, all 60 points would return to an exact repeat
of their initial starting position. When point #1 has completed one cycle
around the circle of its radius, point #2 will have completed two, #3
will have completed three, and #60 will have completed its sixty cycles.
A selection of a few of the simple fractional steps, the low order frac-
tions of the entire cycle, are shown in Column C. In like manner, the
same fractions of the triangles of Column D are extended throughout
one cycle in Column E. The fractions shown are the eighth, quarter,
three-eighths, half, five-eighths, three-quarters, seven-eighths and the
return repeat to zero.

I conclude this preliminary description of differential motion with
a look at another cyclical pattern of movement. Figure (2) p. 52 is a line
plot schematization of this fundamental principle of digital harmony.

It represents a graph of the pathways of twelve points that move through
sine function curves. Again, as with the differential motions of the
Figure (1) examples, point #1 moves one cycle, point #2 moves two
cycles, point #3 three cycles and so on to point #12 which has moved
twelve cycles. The cycles begin and conclude with all twelve points
superimposed. In other words, each sine plot, one to twelve, fits within
the same overall span, while the amplitude of each is diminished pro-
portionally to its number*

All scales ascend a differential progression of resonant nodes. These
nodes are also called beats or harmonics or beat frequency nodes, which
occur at various fractional intervals along any ascending progression of
periodic phenomena. They are events, in time, of resonant pattern that
take form by virtue of the hierarchy of elements which are mapped onto
a polar or Cartesian coordinate system. From another point of view,
differential dynamics presents a new action specific of all the common-
place phenomenon that is best known as moire interference pattern. Inter-
ference, or moire, are simply other terms for visual periodic resonance.

Figure (2) the line plot, shows its harmonic nodes clearly at each
fraction. Column E of Figure (1) (the continuation of Column D) and
Column C (which continues B) display their event patterns of harmonic

*The placement of do, re, mi etc. of the solmization notation will be explained on page 69 in
Chapter VI.

“do”

‘ti’

ia”

‘sol’

‘fa”

“do’

Figure ;

resonance, or beats all generated by the progress of differential dynamics.

Figures (1) and (2) have served to illustrate some elementary ideas
concerning differential dynamics. The paragraphs to follow will outline
the basics of the prototype graphic instrument. This prototype is assumed
to represent only one of a class of instrumentalities for differentially
dynamic pattern. The few illustrations of this entire book provide merely
a hint of the diversity of pattern which can be envisioned. The scope of
this variability should be likened to the diversity of the world’s music
which is derived entirely from a few simple intervals of audio harmonic
relationships as they constitute the tunings of the vast numbers and
classes of musical instruments around the world.

Two major differential parameters that determine event patterns are
employed in our instrument. These parameters are identified as “RD,” a
radius differential factor, and “TD” (theta), an angular differential factor,
to be described later. Both parameters distribute or map the various
elements by controlling their relative spacing with differential motion.
Stretching the spacing of elements by the progress of differential motion
affects overall harmonic relationships which produce the resonant
patterns of the elements. The elements may consist of points or lines, or
constructs which may be made out of points or lines, as for example the
triangles above (at Figure 1, column D) or any pixel (picture element)
component*

Stretching the spacing of elements may be illustrated by imagining a
ribbon of rubber upon which a series of marks are layed out at equal
distances. As the ribbon is stretched by pulling from the ends, the spac-
ing between each mark (element) is extended equally. Whatever way this
ribbon is wrapped or spiralled or otherwise distributed within a field,
back and forth, around or meander, we can imagine this progressive
stretching to affect all the spacing of the elements equally. Also, we can
imagine that the change in spacing produces changing patterns of dis-
tribution over all the field.

From the beginnings of music in prehistory, we have experienced
pattern which the ear perceives as the harmony (linear and simultaneous)
of music. In that same way, these graphic motion harmonics are per-

See also Figure (12), p. 80.

ceived visually. Harmonic considerations dominate the composer’s
choice of notes that sound at any exact time. While a melody consists of
a sequence of notes, the effect is a pattern of movement that is more or
less continuous regardless of the rapidity or slowness of the sequence, or
the length or shortness of the successive intervals.

A melody is an entity vastly greater than the sum of its notes. An
objective of melodic design is a structural totality whose progress from
beginning to end is one indivisible continuity. A simile for this is the
word which composers of the European romantic periods have used
often and appropriately - miracle.

This miraculous entity is often a tonal pattern which departs from a
point of tonal stability, and however it negotiates the push and pull of
forces of harmonic energies, in a kind of game, it will most likely end
with a return to some form of original consonance or to the tonic.

Harmony, consonance-dissonance, order-disorder, tension-resolution
are interrelated terms in the lexicon of music. They are relevant in this
field. For the game is the same, namely to design visual pattern con-
structs as a dynamic interplay of force augmenting force, ultimately em-
bodying the singular attributes of melody, continuity and integrity. All
this, when it happens, as it does with some great music, is justifiably, if
only poetically, termed a “miracle.”

The instrumental concept being described here allows that dynamic
interplay of visual pattern. The composer may select from a branching
tree of pattern-choice at any metric or harmonic juncture of a composi-
tion. Thus, he may choose to construct from infinite options the pattern
of tensional ebb and flow to suit his conceptions and his meaning and
purpose. The least unit of time accessible to the composer in this visual
domain is much the same as in music. Yet, as a comparison, the struc-
tural units are longer than the unit we call a note of music. They are like
subsets of melody, comparable with musical motifs or phrases.

“A note. . . has no meaning in itself.”* It is the combination of notes
that make music. Likewise, one frame of these patterns has no meaning.
This idea is more difficult to accept; we are mislead by the movies. A
still from a movie may show Douglas Fairbanks at mid-thrust in a duel

*Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, p. 52.

54 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

with death itself. That “frame” is a picture worth its thousand words. A
frame of these patterns speaks too few of the thousand words. Sounding
an A minor chord or striking A above Middle C “has no meaning in
itself” and tells us too little, say, about a sonata by Mozart. Just so, a
frame of one of these patterns “has no meaning in itself” and tells us too
little about the action.

The “RD” and “TD” parameters of a prototype instrument delineate
the two-dimensional force-field upon which a “scale” is drawn. We ob-
served that musical scales are distributed upon the spectrum of the aural
field which ranges linearly within limits of hearing. As that single
dimension of pitch frequency is a linear continuum, so by contrast our
visual field provides the idea of a two-dimensional, planar continuum, a
planar field whose coordinates are, in this instance, “RD” and “TD.”

On the musical-linear continuum, notes of a scale are mapped, each
at its own pitch, as determined by harmonic ratio rules of succession.
With our visual-planar continuum, certain conjuncts of the “RD” and
“TD” parameters can be mapped. These form a graphic “scale,” deter-
mined by harmonic rules, or determinants, which are valid in the sense
that notes of music are valid. However the horizontal (time) i\s. vertical
(chordal) distinctions, which are common to music, are interwoven in
this graphic domain.

The planar field must not be mistaken for an actual field. This visual
display is rhetorical - the theory, as distinguished from the practice. It
is a mathematical conception which, in turn, can be mapped onto any
visual field, including any three-dimensional space, by employment of a
large variety of different projections and transformations. There can be
diverse projections such as the polar or Cartesian coordinates or topolog-
ical surface projections, or spatial projections such as illustrated in Fig-
ure (12),* each of which would produce a different pattern, and different
patterns of force. Likewise, the notes of the musical scale are merely
rhetorical until they are “mapped” onto any of the diverse instruments
of the world, by merely tuning that instrument to some conventional
scale or to its own unique scale.

The illustration on pages 56-57, Figure (3) is a typical mapping of

*Scc the description of this illustration on p. 81.

Figure 3

RD = 1

RD = 2

■ M ■

( M. )

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RD = 4

f\ ,0

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RD = 9

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TD = 0

TD = 1

TD = 2

TD = 3

56 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

( ri?"\ )

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TD = 4

TD = 5

TD = 6

TD = 7

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Figure 4

RD = 1
TD = 1

RD = 1
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RD = 1
TD = 3

RD = 1
TD = 4

(M)

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RD = 2
TD = 0

RD = 3
TD = 0

RD = 4
TD = 0

RD = 5
TD = 0

58 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

RD = 1

TD = 5

TD = 6

TD = 7

TD = 8

■fi

r x 1

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RD = 6

RD = 7

RD = 8

RD = 9

TD = 0

conjuncts of “RD” and “TD.” The horizontal coordinates consist of
“TD” units spaced at integers, zero through eight. “RD” is mapped
vertically at integers one through nine. The composer is free to move
from any frame on this array to any other in as many or as few steps as
he may choose. He may move step by step. Or the nature of the scale is
such that he may move from here to there by continuous action. Be-
tween one image and any other in the illustrations of Figures (3) or (4) 1,
10, 100 or 1000 frames might be generated by the program. Continuous
motion from frame to frame would likely be modulated by acceleration
and deceleration at departures and arrivals.

Figure (4) illustrates the flexibility of choice with another example.
Columns 1 through 8 consist of the following sequence of steps: TD = 1 to 0
x RD = 1 to 2; TD = 2 to 0 x RD = 1 to 3; TD = 3 to 0 x RD = 1 to 4; and
so on up to, TD = 8 to 0 x RD = 1 to 9.

More of the characteristics of this so-called scale-field are revealed
by these two illustrations. Note that a simple circle, tangent to the center
point of all the other patterns, recurs consistently on a diagonal across
the array of Figure (3). Note that other repeated or echo patterns radiate
at other angles. In Figure (4) this circle occurs each time at step five,
because the steps here are derived from coordinate values that are lo-
cated at steps on the diagonal of the array of Figure (3), in nine steps for
each of the Figure (4) columns. Note, too, that all nine steps cover differ-
ent space on the array of Figure (3). This will serve to emphasize that
both illustrations represent arbitrary steps on a plane which is, in fact, a
stepless continuum.

The idea of steps in a continuum is one that needs thought and spe-
cial attention. The continuum is stepless until the selection of a fre-
quency value is made. Once made, a string of consequences follows
automatically; the entire family of intervals related to the first selection
falls into place. One can deduce from this the status before and after the
first choice. Out of the void, so to speak, a complete tensional heirarchy
of structural elements is given substantiality by the one singular deci-
sion. Of course, all pattern would be totally different if another element
instead of points were employed or if another coordinate geometry were
devised. There is potentially great variety of pattern by each choice with
each parameter and every geometric configuration. Obviously, the op-

60 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

tions are infinite as they are to the composer of music.

What is not illustrated in the figures, and cannot be illustrated except
by the most extended stretch of imagination (action obviously cannot be
illustrated, only “schematized”), is the hierarchy of tensional force
distributed about a scale-field. Tension is resolved in its own way. Some-
how tension is gained and lost in a way which, at the same time, does
and does not comply with any exact analogue of the tonic force of
music. For example, tension is resolved when any action arrives at that
circle in both illustrations. This, incidentally, is an ideal correspondent
for the function of the tonic in music.

The “flip book” on the upper corners of the pages of this book is a
sentimental return to an early device for the depiction of movement.
Holding the book in one hand while flipping through as many pages as
one can, will reveal a pattern of motion. The complete sequence which is
repeated throughout the book is a cycle representing the motion of one
“octave.” More on this will be found on pages 68-69. To observe the
movement fully, one should try the flipping motions over and over in
order to accumulate a sense of the total action, which reads forward
or in reverse.

At this point in the description it may be worth adding another foot-
note regarding the very idea of freely associated words and my free use
of words such as force, tension, tonic, tone, motion and emotion. Usage,
however, will bear me out. We speak of bodily tone as well as musical
tone. Obviously tone, tonic and tension have more than simply musical
usage. Consider once more the conductor. There are, in his performance,
physical, bodily and musical similes, all working at once. Conducting
symphonic works demands tension, exertion, perception, musical experi-
ence and sweat.

The graphic “tonic” mentioned above is not an analogue to the aural
benchmark. It would be misleading to make such a claim. It would con-
fuse issues regarding distinctions within aural/optical relationships at a
time when there is need for clarification and definition. There are few
analogues of sound to image. At this time, there is only a very high
potential of technical capability for a fruitful partnership in a world in
which we are only beginning to find some fortuitous complementarities.

This chapter has presented an opening set of generalized descriptions.

I must apologize for interlacing them with reference, comparison and
metaphor from music. Some readers may wonder if there might not l?e a
better way to discuss a new subject without constant reference to an
old one. I apologize. I have found no better way to discuss a totally
new subject without comparing it to some existent subject about
which we share common knowledge. Moreover we are viewing a body
of graphic phenomena that is complementary to musical phenomena.
While it was little known until recently, complementary relationships
of music and computer graphics represent a new use for the term com-
plementarity. In the next chapter the nature of this complementarity will
be defined further and explored. The partnership of graphics with music
may prove to be as interesting as the videodisc where it surely belongs.

62 The Instrument - Not Pure Hypothesis - Not a Piano

1 1 1 1

Chapter VI

The Idea of Differential Dynamics
Pythagoras Revisited

The differential parameters TD and RD can be explained in more detail
as follows: given a set of elements such as many points, or a number
of hexagons, circles or wire figure cubes, any of these will be moved
differentially about the picture field. See Figures (3) through (12). The
effect of differential movement of these or any other elements, as stated
above, means that if one element moves at X-rate, #2 element moves
at 2X-rate, #3 at 3X, #4 at 4X, and so on.

These are the mechanics of differential dynamics. As I use the term
harmony to denote the ratio order of both the horizontal and vertical
structure of music, I use this term, “differential dynamics” to evoke, in
the optical world, the nearest analogy to the term harmony. In the follow-
ing paragraphs I will try to explain basic principles in detail and pinpoint
the similarities to and differences from musical harmony.

Parameters “TD” and “RD” determine differential action. “TD”
controls motion in the theta or angular dimension of a polar coordinate
distribution. Otherwise “TD” might affect the X-coordinate of a Carte-
sian translation of the same coordinates. “RD” controls the radius
of a polar array or the Y-coordinate of a Cartesian plot. Of course, there
could be a “ZD” parameter determining a third coordinate for a volu-
metric field, and other parameters.

When a number of points constitute the given graphic elements
employed on a polar coordinate layout, the combined functions of “TD”
and “RD” in the program’s equation generate the family of patterns of
which samples are shown in Figures (3) and (4).

If we were to move from 0 to 1 by “TD” or “RD” (or both), this

would produce an advance of one whole number of pattern progress.
Such an advance produces a significant dynamic development within the
pattern as suggested by various steps in either Figures (3) or (4).

As remarked before, it is a subtle problem to explain the exact effect
of these dynamics without presenting a moving sequence on film or
video * Yet, what transpires - what is depicted here in the graphic pat-
tern of action from one to another harmonic node - is probably the best
possible schematic representation, or simply a kind of “diagram,” of
its parallel in the dynamics of musical harmony

Audio and optical scales show many similarities and obvious differ-
ences of pattern dynamics. For example, assign a value of 1 to some
arbitrary musical frequency, then 2 may follow, and 3 and so on. Be-
tween 1 and 2, of course, lies an infinite number but, the interval repre-
sented by the ratio of 1 to 2 is the primary harmonic relationship of
music, namely the octave. Yet this fundamental interval of music pos-
sesses a puzzling variety of qualities which are totally unparalleled by
any aspect of graphics.

Briefly I’ll try to contrast some particular qualities of the musical
octave v.v. optical intervals. One need only sing a few notes here and
there within two octaves for an experiment.

First of all, one can’t sing an image. With the aid of a projector of
some sort, one can state a visual action in real time, so to speak, as a
performance comparable to singing. One may run a sequence on a
moviola, for example. This differs from dance; it’s a matter of physics.
The performer experiences dance as an obvious musical feeling, but the
body is a real entity in the real world and it is subject to mass and the
physical laws of inertial forces that hardly affect the subtle musical
waves in air or the visual image on a CRT display. It’s as if even the
lightest human body were forever expelled from music’s space where
air and light are free to dance.

Second, although there are octave repeats in the visual field, they are
different in ways which I will attempt to demonstrate later. For the sake
of comparison, sing do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti - then pause. One will sense
the strong “gravitational” pull that urges the final sound of do 2 , the

*See the “flip book” on the pages of this book.

66 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

octave above the first. The gravitational pull of the musical octave is, at
one and the same time, powerful and obvious.

Third, while singing the octave higher, observe the increase in mus-
cular tension of throat and thorax. A significant source of the built-in
tensional hierarchy within all musical structures, this is not obvious
with images. Of course, this muscular tension is intimately involved
with dance.

Finally, for a different perspective on these ideas, one may repeat
R. B. Fuller’s question about higher or lower: Which way is up for the
traveller in space outside the geometrical coordinates of Earth’s gravita-
tional field?* Likewise, how do we conceive these coordinates within
the inner ear ? Which way is the musical up if the questioner is upside
down? So there is some confusion usually in our conception of the rise
and fall of pitch, on the one hand, and “higher” and “lower” tension, on
the other.

Higher and lower, as terms in music have meanings which relate
more to qualities of tension than direction. Departure from the tonic,
whether up or down in pitch direction, is more often than not unequivo-
cally upward (increasing) in tension. Tension is, by far, the more subtle
and pervasive quality of music. A descending line of a musical figure
often ascends tensionally before it is allowed to resolve (descend) to
a conclusion.

With the Tchaikovsky symphonies, for example, to plot the course
of tension, as against pitch direction, is as simple as a, b, c. His musical
designs often consist of progressions of rising tensions which parallel
rising pitch; then both forces turn downhill, so to speak, to resolve.

Richard Wagner, in the opera Tristan and Isolde , has complicated
this pattern a hundredfold. The resolution of a statement has become act
and scene of the drama. The circuitous resolution of a harmonic proposi-
tion is delayed, postponed, restated with ambivalence and innuendo, then
prolonged and extended. All the while tension - roll upon roll of waves
of tension and emotion - subtly accumulates, being sustained and
prolonged. All the while complexity and uncertainty rise and fall with
the melodic line. Finally, after all this strained craving for resolution, we

“Introduction" to Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, p. 17.

sense merely passing incidental resolutions of the harmony, even as the
curtain closes on the scene.

With what is known today, graphics offer few comparisons with
music of European civilization, even from the tenth century onward,
especially the music of Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, or Schoenberg’s,
Webern’s and Alban Berg’s sophisticated chromatic “atonal” innova-
tions. Obviously our current state of knowledge of graphic harmony is
hardly that mature. However, no criticism or offhand objections are
adequate to discredit the many similarities between audio phenomena
and what is known of the graphic characteristics. For there are simi-
larities, familial in quality, that may be exactly right for the complemen-
tarity of a partnership of image and sound.

For further study of similarities and differences, note Figure (5)
pp. 70-71. Perhaps these unorthodox graphic “illustrations” of music’s
resolve to tonic are pertinent. Possibly one only needs a diagram to
support the idea of tonic gravity; but this will need more explanation.

The pattern of order/disorder is the singular dynamic force which
has its effect upon both our visual and aural perceptions. Evolution to
and from greater and lesser complexity - this is the force of harmony
that gives shape to time. Figure (5) is a step-for-step record of that pro-
cess expressed in simple terms of evolving (dynamic) pattern complex-
ity. Column 7 of Figure (5) is reproduced in the flip-book. One should
study this motion on the flipped pages thoroughly. One can observe that
the effect is alike in either direction, just as it is with the musical scale -
up or down. And one may observe a sense of resolve at either end.

As schematized variously in the columns of Figure (5), or once again
in the flip-book, the interval between whole numbers displays an ob-
vious departure from simplicity toward pattern complexity. Midway be-
tween one and the other, the action begins to change, to retrogress, away
from complexity. Though not to the identical starting point, the patterns
return to a similar quality of simplicity. In fact, simplicity is not exactly
descriptive of these dynamics. The thrust is more toward purity and
focus of pattern. To reiterate, the drive of the action does not reverse;
the “feel” of the sequence is directionally forward all the way. No point
between departure and arrival compares with the simplicity of the end
points. This action reminds one, unequivocally, of the cyclical progress

68 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

of: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do 2 . The flip-book is designed to illustrate this
quality of the action.

There is no one-to-one correspondence intended by placing the seven
solmization syllables- “do”, “re”, “mi” etc. - at the side of the nine-frame
illustrations of Figure (5). They provide a metaphor. One is asked merely
to compare the similarity of the feeling of this “image scale” and a tra-
ditional musical scale in the light of the ideas expressed on these pages.
Likewise the solmization scale is metaphorically suggestive when laid
alongside the sine curve pattern of Figure (2) p. 52. This sound/image
juxtaposition is an appropriate symbol for the single hypothesis of this
book; I have elected to create the symbol, featured on the cover, for the
idea of aural/ visual complementarity.

It is impossible to understand completely this aspect of the idea of
musical experience of time. “Do-re-mi” begin a progressive sequence in
time. “La-ti-do 2 ” end the experience by way of an approximate mirror
image. The first and the second do possess a special and unique interre-
lationship - the octave ratio of one-to-two pitch. This whole number
ratio is so distinctive to ear or eye, that even neighboring pitches - even
ti, or re - have the power to point to, or gravitate toward, their respective
adjacent tonic if the “sense” of the tonic is well established. These
nearby tones, and the graphic model, might suggest the idea of leading-
tones, although in musical terminology, only ti is so-called.

There is another point that must be stressed: all the above imperfect
illustrations are descriptions of process in time. Sing do, re, mi, fa, sol,

la, ti then delay do 2 too long. Of course, the gravitational pull

will “leak away” out of the experience. Time is of the essence in all
this. The subject here is about the nature of patterns of time in human
perceptual experience. The illustrations, on the page, in ink, illustrate
stasis and fail totally to show the pattern of time as experience. Hence
the flip-book is presented to “illustrate” motion.

That particular quality, often referred to as the drive of a piece of
music, is almost automatically enhanced with metrical or cyclical consis-
tency and repetition. Rock musicians know this - perhaps too well. On
the other hand, the most difficult visual quality to compose into a com-
position, as every abstract filmmaker may know, is the same driving
propulsive thrust with a visually rhythmic metrical cycle.

Figure 5

70 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

RD = 1
TD = 1

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The washerwoman ascending the stone steps in Ballet Mecanique is
a film loop printed as a strip.* As she reaches the top step carrying her
enormous laundry bundle the film loop ends, at which point it is spliced,
so she starts the climb over again, and again, and again. Her prodigious
“performance” is unforgettable as an example of driving visual rhythm.
But the loop has a mechanical meter which looks as a motorboat might
sound. No other loop in any film since has been quite that hilarious. This
is probably because any film loop, or any computer loop, for that matter,
is mechanically redundant, simplistic and obvious. Too often loops fail
to generate that special quality of music which I will call its drive.
Instead they generate tedium which is exactly the opposite of “drive.”

It is not obvious to everyone that rhythm does not repeat like gears
or loops, turning round and round. 0 The charm of Ballet Mecanique
has to do with the century’s earliest delights with the newness of the
machine in art - typewriters, airplanes, sirens and jazz. Its charm is
hardly in the film’s innovations with rhythm.

The abstract filmmaker should wonder why it is so difficult to pro-
duce any kind of profound rhythmical sophistication. This century’s
avant-garde obsessions with free verse or free rhythm (read a-rhythmic),
and an equal distaste for metrical symmetry (though it is everywhere in
pop music), are attitudes that dull one’s receptivity to rhythmic subtlety.
Filmmakers in fact have never known rhythmical order as elegant as a
simple nursery tune. Otherwise, it would be more broadly appreciated
that rhythmic order begins with - and is generally an intricate subfunction
of - harmonic structure.

Consider the following regarding the way graphic harmonics may
affect rhythmic pattern. The advance from a “TD” value of 1 to 2 as in
Figure (3), can be followed by a jump back to 1. Were this to be repeated
over and over, the effect would be like the charwoman on the film loop -
mechanical. But the advance from 1 to 2 could reverse from 2 back to 1.
Now this would look like a child’s two fingers playing C-D-C-D-
C - D - C on the keyboard. Neither this child nor that “TD” motion
need sound or look mechanical. Nor will either generate drive or much

*Standish D. Lawder, The Cuhist Cinema (New York, 1975) p. 199.

c It is significant that Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whose music may seem mechan-
ically repetitious, are not in the least misguided by easy mechanical rhythmic devices.

72 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

excitement, for very subtle reasons which are beside the point.

We may introduce upon this tedious motion of “TD” values from 1 to 2,
a changing value for “RD,” say from 1 to 2 to 3 to 1. If we alternate
“TD” between 1 and 2, and we add the three-step cycle of “RD,” the re-
sult is a quantum leap in rhythmic novelty and subtlety. With a structure
no more complex than this, we introduce to the visual world a kind of
rhythmical sophistication which is taken for granted in music although it
is unprecedented still in visual art or film.

Other examples abound of tentative gains in understanding of optical
meter and rhythm - and new discoveries. Melodic lines in music often are
described in terms of drive or forward motion which at another moment
in their development, may seem to pause temporarily, then resume
their forward motion. The forward propulsion of a melody is related to
tensional pull and thrust, a function of the hierarchy of harmonic relation-
ships. An early exploratory example of this same pull and push of pause
and forward drive is found in some sequences of the film Arabesque *

The ear, which can discriminate subtle pitch differences, will compare
and sense a frequency ratio of two-to-one as the most obvious and strong-
est pattern of quantized simplicity (resonance) within any range of the
sounding patterns of two tones. Tuning of instruments consists of listening
for frequency interference beats, and “tuning them in.” Visually we need
only observe the oscilloscope pattern to confirm this. Resonance is visible.

Does this suffice in explaining a rudimentary principle of harmony, a
subject of considerable study by physicist and composer alike? Certainly
not, but here at least is a useful hypothetical graphic schema to apply, at
will, to visual compositions, a principle that may encompass no more than
order-disorder relationships.

From intuition, and firsthand experience with my own films and my
experiments, I am convinced that the eye and ear are about equally
receptive to the dynamics of order/disorder phenomena. Aspects of the
gigantic subject of harmony will be modeled and studied in the future
as visual phenomena with the aid of harmonic functions in computer
graphics. Particular computer graphic procedures with dynamic different-
ial pattern will contribute techniques toward understanding related aspects

*See analysis of Arabesque. Chapter IX, pp. 98-99.

of perception.

Differential control of motion, whether or not explainable by order/
disorder principles, does impart pattern and order. All elements of this
visual domain gather and disperse with corresponding tensional charge
and discharge. It is a test of the skill of a composer in this optical world
that he search out unique ways with harmonics to give a shape to the new
potential of pattern dynamics. So it has been for centuries with the com-
poser of music, a part of whose genius is his agility and invention within
the universe of harmonic pattern manipulation.

Figures (6), through (12) suggest only a few of my earliest efforts at
invention. Each figure is a sequence of frames which have been culled
from much longer sequences taken from my own film studies. Each of
these study compositions explores a simple idea. That is, each is a study
of the results of selecting a set of parameters that will determine the
dynamic aspects of a sequence.

74 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

Figure (6) is an illustration of the
results of selecting a triangle as the
elementary unit and a circle as the
matrix pathway while juxtaposing
clockwise and counterclockwise
circular action to produce sym-
metry. The progress of the sets of
elements along the matrix pathway
is illustrated by selecting some of
the harmonic nodes, or resonant
points. ( Matrix III)

Figure 6

Figure (7) presents some of the
symmetrical patterns which are the
result of the progress of 24 squares
around an elaborate three-
dimensional Lissajous figure
(invisible) which is the pathway of
their motion. ( Matrix )

Figure 7

76 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

Figure (8) is a selection of frames
from another section of the same
film. Twenty-four wire-figure cubes
move around the same Lissajous
pathway as above. ( Matrix )

Figure 8

Figure (9) illustrates the result of
selecting a hexagon set that moves
around a horizontal “figure eight”
matrix pathway which was de-
termined by selecting appropriate
values of “RD” and “TD.” The
juxtaposition of this variety of
hexagons of different sizes led to
a dynamic condition of three-
dimensional ambiguity. The hexa-
gon group gives the illusion of
being a group of cubes. This was
an unpredictable consequence. It is
typical of the fertility of pattern
which I found in my earliest studies
in this graphic domain. ( Matrix III )
Figure (10) is one set of patterns
produced by selecting a circle as
the basic element. Figure (11) is
another selection of different circle
dimensions.

Figure 9

78 The Idea of Differential Dynamics - Pythagoras Revisited

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Figure (12)* is included to illustrate future probability. With computer
graphic parameters set at forty times higher resolution, the quality of
image detail is vastly enhanced. Each sphere is centered where a point of
light might have been had we used any one of the many frame patterns of
Figures (3) (4) or (5). Pictured in white in the lower right-hand comer is
the original dot pattern. In the color illustration, that pattern is rotated
about forty-five degrees in space and each of its six lobes are rotated
on their own separate axes as if this were a ship’s propeller. Each sphere
could require approximately a hundredfold increase in the computations
needed to generate the original dot pattern. This will be a trivial refine-
ment of future capability.

Differential graphic processes can be specified within exact time
constraints. Any real-number step or integer step of the parameters
“RD” or “TD,” can be set exactly within any measure of time. Any
acceleration or diminution of rates can be fitted exactly. Because time is
a function of the 24-frame rate of film or 30-frames of video, meter and
rhythm are set by a real-number value divided by the required number of
integer steps (frames) of the projection media. Any motion can be set
to synchronize with another that is set to complete its own action exactly
within the time-span of perhaps a third action. This is a method to
compose polyphony, the coincident play of two or more actions at the
same time.

In summary, we have reviewed, with examples, the functional poten-
tial of differential dynamics in visual art. I have suggested that this clumsy
and temporary term is analogous to the term harmony - for we are deal-
ing with motion and its emotional or tensional dynamics within both
areas. Difference in motion pattern is sensed in terms of ratio, and the
simple, whole number ratios affect, most clearly, order/disorder
dynamics.

Whole number ratios are recognizable to the composer by the more
familiar terms: octave, fifth, fourth, major and minor thirds. But they
should be, and I think they are about to be, recognized as functional facts
of both aural and visual arts. If this is true, this chapter becomes its own
homage to Pythagoras.

*See the reference to this in Chapter XI, p. 126.
Figure 12

Digital Scene Simulation by
Information International, Inc.

Chapter VII

The Idea of a Scale in Music
and in Visual Art

The ear responds to sound frequencies from roughly twenty cycles to
twenty thousand cycles. This continuous spectrum in nature favors no
one pitch over another and most sounds on earth are disorderly mixtures
of many many pitches sounding at once. The single frequency sine tone
is an anomaly. Even the numerous musical instruments that have orna-
mented most cultures throughout history are not capable of sounding a
single pitch. They normally sound various combinations and intensities
of the natural overtones associated with each instruments’s tonal propa-
gation method. Even so, musical scales around the world consist of
precise sets of tones which signify discrete pitch values.

Moreover, the pitch groups of these scales are characterized by their
interrelationships. Of course, a scale is a scale only by virtue of these
relations. The relations are in fact ratios which transform the aural con-
tinuum into something else - a family of ratios (octave, fifth, fourth etc.).

From the primordial continuum, then, music is born by fixing steps
of exact pitch values (a sure sign of human intervention upon the natural
world). Various steps will do, it would seem. We may assume that the
music preceded the codification of the scale. Yet many scales have been
cherished by a succession of generations, and orderly cultures reflect the
great value of this continuity.

Fixing upon some sort of scale happens consistently when making
music. Why? For one thing, observe the motion implied within musical
terminology. “Continuum” reflects the idea of “continuing,” “uninter-
rupted” in some dimension. We “fix” in order to stop the drift of a set
of “steps” that define a scale. There are numerous other examples.

More to the point, as seen in previous chapters, the intervalic rela-
tionships fixed by scales are the dynamic structure of musical composi-
tion. “Music is motion. . .tonal motion. . .chordal motion.”* Fixing a
scale, then, suggests fixating, in an otherwise too fluid medium, a kind of
stepping-stone pathway of exact ratios upon the void, a pattern of or-
derly steps. The ratios themselves constitute an all important instrument
for order. This order may be extremely elaborate in function, involving
cross-referent interlocking relationships that rival Chinese puzzles or the
subtle world of mathematics. For example, the interval of the fifth forms
a fourth interval with the octave above and, with cross-reflectant sym-
metry, the lower fourth forms an upper fifth in the same octave.

Scale is the ideal instrumentality to cope with the problems of a
medium which otherwise would be too fluid. A scale with its surround-
ing rules of usage, may allow for many deviations from its own
specificity, and many do. Indeed, many traditions have “wild card” ex-
ceptions to the rules which simultaneously promote order and variety by
the simple idea of a rule for liberalizing or “bending” the other rules.

Everyone enjoys the lively motion of music; in the final analysis,
that is all there is to music. But, for the composer, that multi-voiced
fluidity presents an inexhaustible and confounding range of choice. So
the musical scale of intervalic ratio is the oldest way to weave a web of
voices into “harmony.” Music is probably the most liquid art and the
oldest. A cave painter may have marked the stones at Lascaux while he
sang to himself a very old song his mother taught him. The song is lost
but the painting is still visible on the cave’s stone walls, suggesting that
art, if not as old as music, is more durable.

Painting with cathode beams is not that durable. Color phosphors are
more fluid and more ephemeral than a song. Often, on a color video
display, they are liquid as fire and as uncontrolled. How does one cope
with these fiery color phosphors that rage magnificently from any mis-
tuned TV? At present, they are subdued into pastel stupor, as with most
video art, or otherwise the phosphors churn on as a kind of aleatory art
of quixotic mistunement.

That the phosphors either rage or quash into bland pastel stupor

*Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, p. 109.

84 The Idea of a Scale in Music and in Visual Art

signifies something about a medium that is uncontrolled, out of hand.
Often this sumptuous color and activity adds up to a mere manic upper
or downer. Little wonder the color video tube was an early item of the
drug faddist’s paraphernalia. The tube is just too fluid to control with less
than a strong mechanism of order. Indeed this video reminds one of
the primordial oneness, out of which the musical scales were formed
- the fiery primal energy at the birth of form. Even its formlessness is
spectacular.

Music making is an act of high precision and accuracy. Tuning
strings or piano or timpani calls for adjustments of barely measurable
micro tensions. The resultant complex of polyphonic patterns produced
by a large orchestra dramatize such preciseness, being a web of many
musical configurations playing at once in exact interrelationship. “Video
music” fails to match that drama, because most video pattern today con-
tains within its phosphor field obvious gratuitous relations that are im-
precise, uncontrolled and accidental. Despite many elements moving at
once in various directions upon the video screen, the pattern is not what
it may presume to be. Video’s inexact “impressionism” is not an equiva-
lent to musical counterpoint by any stretch of imagination.

Yet certain overplayed selections from the compositions of Claude
Debussy have been used to accompany examples of this subdued or
confused video art. Music adds style, credibility and respectability to
that image so that it can be used on public broadcast stations to fill time.

What a blunder - this effort to combine sentiments of the “hearth
fire” with music. Concomitant emotions of tension reflect the genius of
Debussy’s music. Any doubt about this would be dispelled by merely
watching the care and attention that is required of an orchestra of profes-
sional craftsmen in the performance of Debussy’s poems. Why display
limp visuals, however “colorful,” alongside Debussy? Certainly not to
fill time.

TV time may pass, but these bland video actions do not shape time.
Yet imparting lucid shape to time is characteristic of music. Using the
chromatic scale to concatenate tonal reflections upon tonal statement - at
the exact, right time - that is how Debussy, like so many other compos-
ers, gave elegance to the shape of time. Debussy’s epitomic good taste,
set against visuals that are both pretense and ostentation, generate a

painful mix of irreconcilables. Video shapelessness will not mix with
Debussy’s fluorescence if only because of the disparity in degree of con-
trol of the two media. More than that, there is a clash of quality and
attitude. Debussy resides at the pinnacle of a grand epoch. The “art” of
video color phosphors really has yet to begin.

That beginning begins with setting a scale to the multidimensional
color field of video’s charged phosphors. I would hope that Chapters V
and VI have provided a hint that a scale can be laid out upon this rich
continuum which holds the very highest potential for design. The history
of the plurality of musical scales as sketched above should serve to
remind one of the redundancies of culture. There likely will be many
beginnings until this art of video becomes the mature co-equal of music,
equal to Debussy’s style and invention, or the music of earlier centuries.

86 The Idea of a Scale in Music and in Visual Art

Chapter VIII

The Role of Color
and The Role of Music

In his book, Interaction of Color, Josef Albers asks us to compare, as an
example, the four notes of the “Good Morning To You” Kinder song, to
four related color intervals.* Whether sung by child or adult, whistled or
played on an instrument, a melody retains its own character. Yet the
intervals of color relationships are difficult to retain even transposed a
mere shade higher or lower in key. Albers acknowledges how
comparisons of this sort can be informative, but just as often, they are
misleading.

“Tones appear placed and directed predominantly in time from
before to now to later, (my emphasis). . . Colors appear connected pre-
dominantly in space. Therefore, as constellations they can be seen in any
direction and at any speed. And as they remain, we can return to them
repeatedly and in many ways .” 0

Other writers reflect upon the similarities as well as the differences
between musical and color triads, noting the separate ways in which
tones and colors mix. While sounds seem to retain independent identity,
colors do not. Paul Klee and many others gave particular attention to the
implied dynamics of colors. All agree that most color relationships pre-
sent a dynamic thrust toward or away from one color to another.

What if we cease all these considerations of color as pigment and put
aside Albers’s New England fall colors? If instead we turn to observe the
transient color phosphors of the video picture tube, many of the contrast-

*(New Haven, 1971), p. 34.
o Interaction, p. 39.

ing characteristics of those examples of tone and color will no longer
hold true. The video phosphors can be as ephemeral and transient as
tones. Yet most studied and recorded differences between color and tone
are related to the perception of static color versus the transient nature of
tone. What happens when these differences no longer prevail?

Upon a second look at video phosphors we seem to have landed
upon a new continent of exotic perceptions. There is no hint how these
colors will be perceived. There might be a way to liken dynamic color to
music, but no one knows about that even though tones and colors have
undergone separate and joint perceptual scrutiny for a century or more.

Even so, like any new world, this region of color experience in tem-
poral flux has been an object of the imagination and even a few prelimi-
nary explorations. No need to recall a painful history to sense the irony
that after centuries of failed color organ inventions, at last a workable
color organ resides in every home with a color TV. It only awaits its
own software; the hardware has arrived.

On a continent where color presents itself as “from before to now to
later,” the transiency of color lies open to exploration. I confess my own
puzzlement despite nearly forty years of color filmmaking. During all
those years it seemed that the methods used to produce transient color
were the least under control and least understood. In spite of sophisti-
cated color film technology, which underwent a revolution itself in that
time span, I wondered if color control would not change again radically
with the introduction of dynamic video color. Now I know for certain
that it has changed, although phosphor video color dynamics is not yet
fully consolidated under technical or aesthetic control.

One propounds theories for the use and effect of color; I made a new
plan with each film. Rarely have the best ideas lived up to expectations.
Color for the painter is normally an intuitive experience of direct one-
to-one interaction between three components - pigment, hand and eye.
These intimate hands-on interactions call upon a part of the creative
mind other than the reasoning channels needed to work creatively with
color film. My effort to achieve painterly control of color film processes
were too often frustrated. Lab and printing stages interpose processing
time as a kind of insulation between the intuition of the moment and the
actual color effect.

90 The Role of Color and The Role of Music

Video color surely will allow an intimate one-to-one control of
color change. Soon, full control of the profound experience of color in
dynamic transformations will become a visual tensional force and an
instrumentality of art.

A time will come when color, less a subject of static contemplation
as in painting today, will be more a force of dynamic expressive power.
At that time, color’s active association with music is bound to become a
lively issue. Just as the composer calls upon the full repertoire of musi-
cal instruments employing each one, or each combination, for its timbre,
its “coloration,” so he will select from the repertoire of phosphor colors
for similar dynamics.

Over many generations, the idea of this visual dynamism has dwelt
in so many minds that I wonder if it does not rival the dream of man’s
aspiration to flight. That dream was to fly above the earth, departing
from stasis and weight. The dream of visual dynamism is the same: to
leave behind earthbound stasis and, in the mind’s eye, personally or
vicariously, to “fly” in that liquid space of musical architecture without
inertia or gravity - but with that elusive “musical” attribute of color.

Bound for Rotterdam, I tried to film that liquid vision on shipboard.
Dream, myth or youthful fantasy aside, color and tone have an assured
future together in that very space.

After these millennia, music may be too well explored, with its
grand excursions in that domain of fluid architectonic fantasy. I con-
templated with misgivings the discrepancy between the very old - music
- and the very new - electro-optics. Wondering how such disparate cou-
pling could ever be reconciled, I speculated upon the idea of starting
afresh within my vision of optical/aural complementarity.

This reflection may make sense: if, as noted in the foreword of this
book, twentieth-century music is in crisis, here is a way (if a somewhat
chastened way) beyond the so-called creative exhaustion of classical
meter and harmony. One can foresee a fresh start for music with a fresh
graphic partner as one-to-one architectonic co-equals in this newly dis-
covered wonderland of digital harmonies.

I was never fully content with the relations of my own films and
their sound. I saw in every sound track a form of compromise and each
presented a dilemma. Many viewers sense an incompatibility here and

argue for no sound at all. Yet another argument is noteworthy. The eye,
as a witness to events in nature, expects a matching sound with each
event. Why should a visual experience, so close to music as these films,
happen in silence? We think of dance or opera as a matter of course.

On the other hand, apart from the obvious traditions that music and
painting are both wholly self-sufficient, why not a musical experience to
be shared with, and equally involving, the eye? Why not visual color
patterns which are so constructed as to weave with aural patterns in a
fruitful complementarity of architecture? The interrelationship might be
as elaborate and the consort as true as violin and piano which discourse
in the typical partnerships of all duo or multi-voiced compositions. This
would be a partnership that is valid only if the combinations produce
interest greater than the separate contribution of either the aural or the
visual member.

Here, many will argue that this is exactly the objective, often
achieved, in the relationship of music with dance. Yet the complemen-
tarity in my vision would begin at the very limits of the ideal of dance
joined with music and proceed from there. For that ideal is instantly
exceeded, simply because of inertia and gravity. The body has more -
and the cathode beam has less - size and mass than the sound of a flute.

With real enjoyment, I recall working with my brother on a few of
our earliest films* These presented a one-time exception, within my
experience, to the dilemma of matching appropriate action with music.
That exception, directly due to our music-making instrument, provided
an unequalled opportunity to integrate image and sound. First of all, the
musical instrument was as primitive as our animation procedures. Sec-
ond, and most important, the procedures of frame by frame production
were alike for both sound and image. Despite many difficulties, design
ideas for image somehow stimulated counterpart sound ideas, and in turn
sound pattern was literally mirrored, figure for figure, in an image/ sound
dialog.

It will be useful to look at details of these early experimental film
making processes . 0 Our homemade sound track device consisted of an

*See James and John Whitney's films Five Abstract Film Exercises (1941-4).
o See Appendix, p. 151. Films produced with this equipment won First Prize at the First Interna-
tional Experimental Film Competition, Belgium, 1949.

92 The Role of Color and The Role of Music

array of pendulums which were tunable by adjusting weights, as are
clock pendulums. The quality of sound produced by this primitive in-
strument, which makes no sound of itself (its frequencies are sub-sonic),
compares with the early electronic music produced after the introduction
of general music synthesis a few years later.

The pendulum device produced, silently and ever so slowly, a con-
ventional optical sound pattern on the motion picture film by virtue of
the mechanical action of swinging pendulums. In other words, the
waveform patterns of musical events are drawn out in time by a factor
of a hundredfold magnification. Playing a musical “motif” is done by
starting and stopping each pendulum at its right moment as marked on
the score. It could take more than sixteen minutes to record ten seconds
of sound track. Then, these sound patterns on the film must be de-
veloped and played on a conventional sound projector to hear, for the
first time, the motif.

Ever so slowly, music is made, wave for wave, by the swing of a full
scale of pendulums. So slowly, in fact, that each minute interval of time,
never before accessible to composer or musician, can be composed and
structured. Exceedingly brief clusters of tones simply can be played out
by starting and stopping the pendulums, sixty or eighty or more succes-
sive pendulums sounding within the hundred seconds it takes to record
one second of a composition. Of necessity, we differentiate between
rhythm and timbre for obvious reasons, but both are the same if time is
viewed at these hundredfold expansions.

More to the point of this digression, the instrument served as a
model for conceptualization. As with my experience with counting gear
teeth as a model of geometry by means of my mechanical analog precur-
sors of today’s computer, so this mechanical music machine drew my
mind into speculation upon digital music instruments. In my opinion, our
pendulums in the early 1940s and the music we composed presented
more that was relevant to the musical issues of our time than the tape
splicing technology of the electronic music of the 1950s.

Intuition informed me that the very mechanical (homemade) sloppi-
ness of pendulum linkage to light-valve in our sound recorder (in itself a
novel transient waveform generator) was a significant factor in tonal
quality. It suggested that the source of the timbre (sound quality) and the

appeal of the traditional, still unsurpassed, handmade musical instru-
ments results from inharmonic, transient waveforms, which are exceed-
ingly varied and brief. We produced similar inharmonic transients by
starting one pendulum and allowing it to swing perhaps only four cycles,
then starting another as the first was stopped, then starting a third, say,
after the second’s twelfth cycle. Thus, patterns of microclusters were
composed in the domain of rhythm. Yet in their transience their net
(playback) effect produced timbres in the composition being performed.
We were more than pleased with these sound qualities; we were amazed.

In general terms, the lessons from these experiences suggest to me
that there are benefits to composing pattern from the smallest element
outward, from the center and not from the fringe, both for optical and
aural composition. Nowadays, opposing points of view of synthesis v.v.
analysis are associated with opposing attitudes on the creation of both
electronic image and music. The television camera (and the movie cam-
era before it) records a given gestalt, so to speak. Editing - choosing
subject, “camera angle’’ and sequence of scene to scene - is a process of
analysis. Improvisation - the improvised performance in real time with
any musical instrument, video or audio synthesizer (both confusingly
misnamed) - is a process of analysis.

On the other hand, creating graphic action or the music out of the
blank nothingness, as in my computer-generated procedures, would seem
to represent the synthesis process. By the same consideration, writing
music note for note at the manuscript is also a process of synthesis. I
favor the synthesis approach to composition, more or less, over trends of
experimentation around the world. My position is one that may run con-
trary to the many individuals and institutions oriented to real time per-
formance upon audio and video “synthesis’’ machines through im-
provisation.

Our films of the early forties, composed on a pair of handmade
machines, one for picture and one for sound, are “homespun” at best.

But it is doubtful if, to this day, many other films possess a similar
tightly drawn structural interrelatedness of their sound and image parts.
Those films are one example, albeit ever so primitive, of exact com-
plementarity between the architecture of the sound and the picture.

This earliest practical experience with complementarity, however

94 The Role of Color and The Role of Music

primitive, still lives clearly in my memory, and because of it I believe
fully in the prospect - near at hand - that sound and image composed on
the same digital instrument will have totally revolutionary consequences.
In a technological aural/ visual universe, music must become bisensory.
Of course I do not mean music must always be bisensory

I have not composed much digitally integrated sound with image.

Nor have many others. My computer facility for digital music is still
evolving and at this time, no instrumentation permits full dynamic
manipulation of color. As to both prospects, it is clear that in the future
there will be practical instrumentation for both digital music composition
and controlled color image. Indeed this is the wave of the future which
is due in this decade.

The following chapter will offer a description of the film, Arabesque.
Composers may wish to compare how close, or distant, graphic problems
of composition approach their own. The film is perhaps a meditation
upon the concept of aural/ visual complementarity. It is also an example
of synthesis - a work from “the center not from the fringe.”* Still,
Arabesque is a compromise. Its digitally composed image is not matched
with digitally composed music. Its sound, however appropriate, is as
severe a compromise as any others I accepted reluctantly upon this long
road toward the goal of free composition with instrumentation allowing
perfected digital access to image and sound through digital harmony.

*Alan Watts, in his “Introduction” to A1 Huang, Embrace Tiger Return to Mountain (Moab, Utah,
1973 ).

• •

*••••••••*

Chapter IX

Arabesque - An Analysis

Opening Section:

The generative design for the entire structure of Arabesque is an array of
360 points distributed around a circle. These points are numbered 1 to
360 and they move according to the differential rule of number value
that moves all 360 points in one direction, horizontally to the right, each
point at its own differential rate in value steps from 1 to 360. Point #1 is
located at the bottom of the circle. It is the first point on the right of the
vertical diametric axis of the circle. The point numbers increase 1, 2, 3,
to 360, counterclockwise around the circle. Point #360 lies next to #1,
on the left of the vertical axis, at the bottom.

The illustration, p. 98, Figure (13) presents a selection of frames of
the basic action from which the entire film was made* This action is
complicated because of the modulo rule change at the frame edge. As
any point reaches the right-hand edge of the field, its X coordinate value
automatically drops to 0 by a modulo function of the computer program.
This causes that point to jump to the left field edge where it continues to
progress to the right as before. The seventh, eighth and ninth frames of
Figure (13) show steps in the progress of the modulo jump to the left.

The selected frames in Figure (14) present more detail of the overall
design of the film. Because this represents the generative fountainhead
of the entire film, it will be informative to describe all of these frames
in detail.

Differential rightward motion rules all of the 360 points throughout

*See Chapter X 1 1, for listing and description of Pascal program.

the entire film. A complete cycle of differential ac-
tion can be calculated to be 360 cycles of the fastest
point. This is required to complete 1 cycle of the
slowest point. The first 360th of one whole cycle is
completed in the steps shown in Figure (13). Point
#360 has moved one full cycle when it meets point
#1 at bottom, center in the ninth frame. That first
complete cycle of the fastest point has been com-
pleted at the second frame of the illustration, Figure
(14). The second cycle is shown in the third frame
and the third cycle, or the third 360th fraction, is
shown in the fourth frame. The fifth, sixth, seventh
cycles follow. The last frame of this illustration is
not the eighth but the 90th cycle, or the simple
whole number fraction, the first quarter or one fourth
of the whole cycle.

Arabesque begins with the circle of 360 points
arrayed as noted. The action moves rightward to the
first 360th cycle step. At this point, cyclical action
ceases and another action begins - a polarity switch,
an inversion or reversal. One well-known coordinate
feature of computer graphic displays allows the
image to be mirrored or inverted by a simple switch
of the polarity of either the X or Y coordinate val-
ues. This is also expressed as an inversion of coor-
dinate values. After the opening action advances its
one cycle step, the action now changes smoothly to
a reversing action of the horizontal polarity values.
At the completion of one full polarity switch, the
forward action smoothly resumes to make one more
cyclical advance. Then, at the end of the second
360th cycle step, once again polarity values are
switched. This time it is the Y coordinate value that
will be changed progressively to negative. See
Figure (15).

These alternating cyclical motions, interrupted

Figure 13

98 Arabesque

for polarity switches, create an interesting and hesi-
tating pattern of motion which resembles somewhat
a very slow and stately dance. Composers are famil-
iar with musical structures that alternately advance,
then seem to dwell a beat or two, and then continue.
In the film, this quality of action is an alternation
between forward motion and symmetrical motion.
The cyclical advance moves consistently to the
right. This forward movement changes to the sym-
metrical motion, the axis of which is alternately
horizontal or vertical. Then a resumption of the
forward, rightward motion follows.

In the film’s opening sequence, at the middle of
the second symmetrical action, the curved triangular
image has been squeezed down to no more than a
horizontal line located at mid-frame. This reduction
to a line occurs at the point when the Y coordinate
reaches zero between Y+ and Y— . At this point of
the action a substituion is made for another copy of
this same action which is enlarged about 20%. This
new sequence is combined with itself. The super-
imposure is also enlarged to the same size as its
partner and it is inverted.

Now both of these new sequences move in
reverse. Since the moment of that substitution coin-
cides, all three - the one dropping out and the two
that commence here - effect a kind of magical event.
I call it magic because this act of substitution is
smooth and practically invisible (all three elements mo-
mentarily appear to be merely one horizontal line). It
is all the more magical because it is not noticeable
that the actions of both have begun a retrogression
which takes them back to the circle from which
they began. This concludes the opening section
of the film. See the color strips, Figure (15).

Figure 14

Figure 15

100 Arabesque

Section Two:

The second section opens with a fade-in of a circle similar to the first
section but half the size of the first. Furthermore this circle’s #1 point is
at the top of the left of its vertical axis. Thus, progress to the right with
the rightward moving points, produces a different pattern of circle
unfoldment. The motion is faster than before and the action appears to
be complete through one full cycle. This is not so. See Figure (16).

Instead, after this circle has progressed approximately a third of the
way through its cycle, it is faded out. In fact, this fade-out is a cross-
dissolve with another action of a larger horizontally elliptical transfor-
mation of the circle. This new elliptical transformation cross-dissolves,
or fades-in near the ending of its own cycle. The larger figure deceler-
ates to a stop as it forms into its final elliptic figure. The smaller circle,
which began the sequence, fades-in over this action. It is now ready to
begin again at the same position from which it started before.

The elaborate cyclical character of this 24-second section, of which
there are six repeats, does generate a strident driving rhythm that is at
least one level more sophisticated than the film loops of Fernand Leger’s
Ballet Mecanique* The action may not be as comic or historic, but there
is more going on here - more of the kind of organization of forces
which gather, rather than disperse, metrical rhythmic pattern. This is
what we expect when any driving rhythm is set in motion in any musical
work composed over the last four or five hundred years; examples
abound in music from Scarlatti, Vivaldi (Seasons) to Stravinsky.

Section Three:

The third section takes up this strident rhythmic pace. After a pause
consisting of a slow fade-out of the last horizontal ellipse, there follows
an equally deliberate fade-in of an opening vertical ellipse, this being
still another variation of the original action. This one starts its #1 point
at the top right of the vertical axis so that a third type of action is
announced, as shown in Figure (17).

The momentum of the second section is restored by the action of this
new ellipse as it moves to the right. It is followed by a second ellipse

*See Chapter VI, p. 72.

Figure 16

102 Arabesque

which appears 32 frames later in the same starting position. Then an-
other, and another appear in a canon or rondo type action of repeats and
superimpositions until a total of five have started at 32-frame intervals.

Each of these fresh starts is in a different color and while centered
vertically, the later ones are displaced slightly above or below the hori-
zontal center. See the color strips, frames one to eleven.

The action of run and pause in the first section was caused when the
rightward motion was arrested and a symmetrical polar switch was sub-
stituted. This is taken up by a similar alternation. These new ellipse
actions run through each fifth of their complete cycle at which stage the
points form five ellipses that are spaced symmetrically in the field. The
five ellipses undergo the same symmetrical polar switch, or reversal, first
in X, then in Y, then in X and Y, (causing the five ellipses to shrink to a
point and then open back to their original size). Finally, at the fourth of
these fraction stages, there is once more an X-axis polar switch. See
Figure (17).

More than is usually the case, the illustrations fail to convey so much
as a hint of the quality of the motions involved at this point of the film,
because a form of “counterpoint” develops at this juncture which can be
described better than it can be illustrated with any limited selection of
still frames from the motion - a counterpoint of smooth flowing action
that resides more or less “within” the driving rightward motion. The two
retain their separate identities while neither diminishes the other.

Six different superimposures in different colors are on the screen at
once. After the opening moments of this canon, the action has increased
in complexity until the smooth symmetrical motions superpose with the
rightward driving motions at all times. Yet, each retains its identity. The
opening build-up to this is matched by a closing retard, finally dwelling
upon the action of the last ellipses that oscillate slowly by means of a
series of the same X-axis polar switch. See frames eleven to twenty,

Figure (17).

Section Four:

The fourth section is a play with fractions. Like Section Two, it begins
with a circle that commences a rightward drive to its third fraction
where three circles are arrayed horizontally across the frame. Upon

103

Figure 17

104 Arabesque

105

Figure 18

106 Arabesque

these three circles, three vertical ellipses appear. From these starting
positions, each one advances, not rightward as each time before, but
upward. In effect these actions have been turned ninety degrees counter-
clockwise. All three actions begin simultaneously, but all three actions
are timed to a different low-order fraction - namely the third, fourth and
fifth fractions. The consequence of this is a changing action pattern
across the frame at all times as each vertical, upward moving column
slows in turn to its own whole number fractional resolve. See Figure (18).

The first fraction resolve that shows is the fifth, which appears on the
left, then the fourth on the right, then the third at center, then the second
fifth on the left and the second fourth (which is the one-half fraction
resolve). The third fifth is followed now by the second third, the third
fourth and final fifth, and at last all three columns resolve to three ellipses.
Once again they are superimposed by the same three circles of the
opening which advance rightward till this action resolves to the end
of a full cycle - at the circle.

This triple play action offers another hint of new ways with optical
counterpoint. An arbitrary working out of three fractional sequences
hardly constitutes a fugue. But consider the coincidental timing that
matches the departure and return of the three vertical actions with the
three circle elements of the horizontal action. A more elaborate plan of
departures and arrivals and the various patterns of their layout in the
optical field could be constructed now. I begin to imagine what it was
like to compose the fugues produced in great numbers by the legion of
polyphonic composers.

Section Five:

This is an interim section during which various border fragments (more
on these later) jump, skip and step, in and out, with a free rhythmic play
against an aural percussive accompaniment.

Section Six:

The sixth section presents several examples of various opportunities for
optical composition. It begins with a canon based upon the first 360th
fraction presented at the beginning of Arabesque. This 0. to IS action,
completed in approximately four seconds, holds while a second action

Figure 19

108 Arabesque

begins, rotated 72 degrees around. Four seconds later a third begins,
rotated another 72 degrees. Then another begins and finally the fifth is
completed. The five figures have now formed a pentagram of curved
linearity - a strong image found in Gothic rose windows of Europe, in
turn derived from Islamic figures. See Figure (19).

With the pentagram completed by the fifth repeat of the 0. to IS
action, all five continue in unison through their X-polarity switch, as in
the opening section; then the second 360th fraction is completed and
halfway into the Y-polarity switch, the retrogression begins as in the
opening events. The conclusion is “taken apart” much in the manner by
which the starting of this section was “assembled.”

Examples of ideas for further study abound here. One should usually
avoid assembling elements piece by piece, while each piece, already in
place, remains static, waiting for the whole to be completed. Assembling
elements that way gathers accumulating stasis. It would seem that this is
a valid optical canon, because ways can be found to overcome the static
factor. In this section of Arabesque , even the aural action is a factor that
contributes to minimizing stasis*

Doubling of voices (repeating an action in unison - however it is
transpositioned about the field) should be avoided. Although the penta-
gram which is produced is an evocative image in motion, still that motion
is strongly kaleidoscopic - an avoided term and an avoided effect, most
of the time, because the term and the effect are overused. Symmetries
generated by kaleidscope or snowflake are not unwelcome. But like
medication, overuse quickly becomes overdose. Doubling of voices pro-
duces redundancy of motion too. Kaleidoscopics and doublings are both
quickly overdone.

Composing this section offered the most difficult choices. It remains
temporally dubious - probably the first section where actions begin to
drag. Perhaps it is too deliberate, too slow for its place in the total
scheme. It is not a miracle of perfect timing, unfortunately.

In this analysis, these paragraphs constitute a cautionary section.
Surely, caution should be exercised with the very idea that static parts

*See Chapter VIII. Digital interrelations of aural/visual composition point the way around these
problems of design.

109

Figure 20

110 Arabesque

can be built into a canonical structure. The goal of action cannot ever be
a static image. Why sit still for the tedious procedure of composing
optical stasis? This violates the primary logic of the idea that “motion
molds time.” All of art history spans the age of timeless, permanent art.
We are accustomed to expect visual stasis. On the other hand, art in
motion is an uncommon idea that must be cultivated. It is best, for now,
to discover, then count, the ways motion molds time.

Section Seven:

Arabesque s final section is a play upon symmetrical action which is
derived from switching horizontal polarity values. Several new full-field
variations of this recurring action are played in canon against them-
selves. They produce a rich texture of color and action as a fanfare
conclusion with appropriate sound. See Figure (20).

It might be expected that the driving action of earlier sections would
belong here. But this time more symmetrical action with more scale and
breadth of dynamics provides the bombast of a cadenza while its sym-
metry retains a sense of resolution that is called for here as an ending.
The early rightward drive carried the action forward, onward and up-
ward. Now this symmetry, which at its peak is as forceful as the driving
rhythms, produces actions that summarize without introducing new
ideas. Finally the symmetrical action is allowed to dwindle away in a
quiet resolution.

A few graphic details remain to be described. First, the same switch
of polarity used throughout this composition has still another application
as a rhythmic framing instrument such as the percussion instruments of
an orchestra. The line drawn by the action at the first 360th fraction is an
inverted loop; Its Y-axis is reduced and its X-axis is extended, then
the action is cut at a certain point so that a loop is created which repeats
as an unchanging rhythmic pattern.

This loop, too, is hardly different from Leger’s washerwoman. Critics
have reminded me many times of this, objecting to the “jump-cut” in
what is otherwise a smooth action. I respond that the jump adds a per-
cussive slapstick snap to the action, a welcome contrast. This action,
used sometimes at the sides or below and inverted above, in one case
helps to diminish the static aggregation of the assembling pentagram

Figure 21

112 Arabesque

figures. It is an experimental device. I wonder if it will not one day be
considered very naive. See Figures (16) and (19).

A second detail is a further elaboration of this framing device made
into an ornate border used at the opening and ending titles. Not just a
small piece of action around the 360th fraction, but longer segments
from throughout the entire cycle are squeezed in the Y-axis, then re-
peated around the four sides of the frame. These in turn are repeated one
upon another to produce the intricacies of the border pattern seen in the
illustration, Figure (21).

Color throughout the film is the result of another exploration of pho-
tographic color dynamics. More dynamic than my other films, the color
is in constant flux. Color changes almost every frame in smooth trans-
formations by means of the installation of a color wheel at the optical
focus of the condenser light source. The wheel is turned mechanically as
a sequence of frames is filmed producing an ungainly-to-control but ef-
fective random serialization of the color patterning for the entire film*

Music for Arabesque is related to its title and to my reasons for
identifying with the subject. Islamic design, hand in hand with its
geometry and calligraphy, was a source of inspiration in this work. I had
recently come to know of Pythagorean influences which spread south
and east from Greece into Islamic culture prior to its establishment in
the monastic libraries of Europe. I sensed that the indirect meandering of
the casual connections between Islamic ideas of cosmos, music,
geometry and architecture had the quality and shape of an arabesque.

Once again, as with so many works before, I was obliged to search
for given music to fit the completed essay of my visual composition.

This time, I was reasonably satisfied with what was found. The im-
provisational sound track is the excellent work of an Iranian national
scholar who teaches at UCLA, Manoocheher Sadeghi. The source of his
performance was classical Iranian Santour music.

Sec my references to the color problems, photographic vs. video phosphors, p. 90, Chapter VIII.

Chapter X

From Music to Visual Art and Back

Someday the term digital harmony may be a commonplace expression
associated with a major evolution of twentieth century art technology.
Because of digital harmony, music becomes visible. Performance
escapes the bondage of time. Time achieves a totally new condition of
substantiality. In this chapter I will explain each of these three ideas.

First, consider this nontechnical outline of a few principles that
should be known about digital systems. Numerous microscopic memory
locations hold signal bits, “on or off.” In the nomenclature of digital
electronics, a bit is the smallest subunit of signal. Usually bits cluster
into words consisting of 8, 16, 36 or more bits:

(oxooxxxoxooxooox)

This row might be a 16 bit word with its first bit (at the right) “on” (x);
its second, third and fourth bits “off” (o); its fifth bit, on and the next
two, off, etc. reading right to left. The least significant bit is at the right.

This binary word translates into the number, 047221 (base 8). It
could as well represent sixteen dots on a television screen or letters of a
text or a fragment of an audio wave form. In ordinary memory devices,
billions of bits may be stored more or less with security. They can be
shifted around in digital systems, performing tasks of logic and manipu-
lation and performing processes with images, sounds and words. This
digital bit storage principle is probably among the century’s greatest
innovations.

Unlike film or the phonograph groove or even magnetic tape, the
binary digital signal is almost invulnerable. This must be explained. In

115

fact, most digital signal carriers are quite as destructible as film, groove
or tape. But optical or aural signals, translated into a pattern of digital
bits, in effect, transform into a sum of on or off information.

Simply stated, on or off means just that. There is no halfway.

Either the signal is there or it is not. There can be no progressive signal
degeneration. This is ideally true when a signal is maintained and pro-
cessed within a dependable computer system. Relocating, over and over,
gigantic conglomerate patterns of bit signals can be accomplished almost
without bit error.*

Regardless how the composer elects to compose the waveform and
tempo of his composition, digital signal invulnerability permits him to
play, section for section, over and over, at fast or slow speed, making cor-
rections or changes as he chooses, as often and as extensively as he
needs, but still retaining his composition on a record possessing that
invulnerability.

Contrast this with the thirty-year-old magnetic recording technology.
Generation for generation rerecording means progressive and intoler-
able degeneration of the quality of the signal.

All nondigital recording of sound or image requires start up and shut
down time, needed in order for any system to reach play/record speed
or to stop. These systems are all dependent upon some mechanical way
of advancing the time record in actual physical motion past some sort of
pickup reading or writing device. Temporal stability is a critical mechan-
ical problem whether or not a particular system may include the best
solid-state signal processing.

On the other hand, because all computer systems synchronize by
precise clock timing (all solid-state, no moving parts), any music or
optical sequence can be duplicated, edited, played and replayed, forward
or backward, fast or slow, a fragment at a time. The signal is stored as a
digital pattern that is called up at will at a specific clock rate from a
memory device which routinely checks for signal (bit) error. The record

*For an example just how error free the binary signal can be in some digital devices: “In a high-
performance magnetic disk memory the errors caused by dirt and other mechanical problems cor-
rupt approximately one bit in 10 billion bits. Coding for the detection of errors reduces the error rate
to one bit in 10 trillion bits.” From Scientific American, August 1980, Volume 243, Number 2; R. M.
White, Disk-Storage Technology p. 139.

1 16 From Music to Visual Art and Back

is in fact free of background noise - an invulnerable image, including its
time dimension, which is safe in memory until committed to one or
another transportable storage package.

The typewriter on which I compose this text is a digital computer
word processor. No matter how slowly I write, rewrite, erase and write
again, all the text is stored in memory until I call for a printout. Then,
my tedious daylong labor comes forth faultlessly onto paper at an
exact character-per-second rate. If this were music or image - as it
soon will be - the same editing and composing powers would prevail.

Now to discuss the three ideas of the opening paragraph which were:

1. Music becomes visible.

2. Performance escapes the bondage of time.

3. Time achieves a certain substantiality.

Music becomes visible through various developments. This book shows
how a complementarity with a graphics of motion is one of music’s
present great potentials. In lesser ways altogether, digital music compos-
ing programs include applications of everyday computer graphic
features. Waveform plots and envelope graphs directly aid composers.
Time is better represented on a visual computer plot than by conven-
tional musical notation. And there are other ways to employ graphic
displays to aid in music composition.

Concerning the second idea - that a performer is somehow bound to
the requirements of timing exactness, and will escape that bondage with
future digital systems - the following is a brief view of the restraints
which time places on our ability to perform music and how this may
change.

My experience with early training in music is typical. At age nine or
ten, I was given piano lessons. (Beethoven was, . . . “standing in front of
the clavier and weeping,” probably at age four.*) The drudgery, more
than tears, and the impatience with one’s clumsy beginnings, and the
insult to the ear, are obstacles that must be surmounted at an early age. I
reached this conclusion in only a few months. Yet this was not exactly

^Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Life of Beethoven, revised and edited by Elliot Forbes (Princeton,
1967), p. 57.

117

the problem.

To fail or to succeed at a career in the performing arts comes by
one’s skill with time. One must meet the challenge to organize his
senses and his muscular coordinations to the “microsecond.” The tim-
ings are simply critical by the necessity to meet each musical moment
on time. Actor, mime, pianist, orator, comic or violinist, all show this
mastery with time. Training to maintain that skill demands their atten-
tion and practice throughout the remainder of a career.

A real microsecond (not my figurative use of the term, as above) can
be divided in half, then quartered, then halved and otherwise divided
several ways by casual choice of a computer’s programming parameters.
The point is, timing precision is easy. Performance constraints with time
are surmounted, not by training, but by the capability to shape and
secure a final perfect record by the computer’s editing process as noted
in my introductory paragraphs of this chapter. Thus performance escapes
the bondage of time; but I would imagine this is an insufficient argument
and so will offer another.

If weak in composition, this century has produced an extraordinary
proliferation of sublime solo and ensemble performance. Probably more
and greater world renowned soloists and orchestras perform today than
in any previous epoch. Few would accept any argument on behalf of
synthesized Bach, whether by synthesizer or by computer, so I must
continue on with the argument for a digital system’s role in future per-
formance functions.

Bach manipulated the Musical Offering theme assuming, and prob-
ably accepting without question or complaint, the known constraints of
performance and instrument. Today altered scopes of performance and
instruments might suggest to him some different manipulations. The
Offering has often been transcribed for some such reasons. Bach’s
visions might change once more with an instrument to interweave com-
position with performance. He might welcome a means to combine
writing, listening and rewriting with ease - correcting or deleting and
refining closer to his mind and feelings than possible with pen on
paper. For all that, the image of Bach at a computer terminal is as senti-
mental and ludicrous as the cliche it has become in popular home
computer journals.

1 18 From Music to Visual Art and Back

If timing can be matched micromoment for moment by computer,
what about the “feeling” of a performance? The subtlety of musical
experience is another matter: who should judge matters as to how each
detail of a work should “feel,” if not the composer himself? Bach at a
computer keyboard is less dubious than programmers “having a go” at
interpreting Bach. It is wrong, of course, and anachronistic, to attempt to
recreate Baroque music with a computer.

However, it is not wrong at all to compose original work for this new
instrumentation. This, then, is the most powerful argument. The argu-
ment is as true today as it was when Bach himself composed the book of
studies that explored The Well-Tempered Clavier, i.e: the compromised,
adjusted and retuned keyboard, a technical development just becoming
accepted in his time. It would be difficult to overstate the advantages
which reside in a technical advancement so far-reaching as this revolu-
tion in the very process of music making. It is irrelevant that “player
pianos” and other nineteenth century automata, the music box, calliope
and all the others, were doomed to be evaluated merely as novelties.

This revolution relates to a humane compromise with the very essentials
of the ways of making music. Digital systems procedures greatly im-
prove the method for making music by several magnitudes of im-
portance. This will be explained as a third point of argument.

Incidentally there is a note of hope for those who know music well
and rightfully loathe nearly every piece of “electronic” music which
they have heard. At this writing, I believe we approach a benchmark in
comprehending new theories of tone generation by digital waveform
synthesis. I am not sufficiently informed to include details here except to
repeat my own observation that most electronic instruments up to the
beginning of this decade have been made upon false principles, proven
false by the ear. Thus, despite this hatchet upon the past, my optimism
for the future of digital systems is informed by new theoretical work
upon waveform synthesis. My expectation for genuine musical enjoy-
ment is unswerving.

The third point of this chapter, about the substantiality of time, is
related to all the above arguments - as it were, the complement to them.
Music is fleeting. This very old observation, repeated by scientists, an-
thropologists and critics, makes sense, although the performer hardly

119

knows of this. As he practices for performance he loses the sense of the
fleeting nature of music because he plays and plays again each detail,
shaping it like clay. Its substantiality is in his hands; he feels something
more solid than gossamer in the fleeting pattern of tone.

Music, as a digital record in a computer composing instrument, is
accessible to the composer in the performer’s sense of its substantiality.
With digital system repeatability, time gains that substantiality. The re-
peatability and the accessibility we gain, if a musical signal is generated
as digital signal in a computer, systematically improves its “materiality.”
We gain the power to shape the musical signal as substance.

The composer rarely had this power. Performance. thus escapes its
previously permanent status as the historic hostage to the “trained” per-
former or orchestral group who, ostensibly, are the masters with time.
The fleeting insubstantiality of music is transformed. Composing becomes
more like molding clay, because of the hands-on process of digital mem-
ory manipulations. The composer may mold this particular substance
with his instant, interactive responses to the sensitivity of his own ear.
Time is mastered and turned into substance.

Add to this substantiated hands-on process of sound, the same
hands-on process of the color image in motion. A revolution in intui-
tional intimacy with sound and color is the result. The distances from
music to visual art and back have been shortened by this newfound sub-
stantiality. The digital hardware is at hand. The software calls for a
collective exploration of principles of digital harmony as they apply to
image and sound alike.

120 From Music to Visual Art and Back

121

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Chapter XI

Summary and Prospect

Less than thirty years have passed since the beginning of computer
graphics. We are witnessing the materialization of another fertile domain
of architectonic pattern. Before us lies an optical domain which may
prove to be quite as vast as the historic world of music. I work within
this visual domain of harmonic potentialities experiencing the strong
challenge to creative skill that composers of the baroque or classic
epochs must have felt.

Now and then throughout the several centuries of musical life in
Europe, through the music of some scholarly composers one feels their
sense of wonder at the splendor of musical possibilities spread before
them. One is reminded of Padre Antonio Soler or Domenico Scarlatti, in
eighteenth century Spain; both consummated their lives engrossed in
constructing works that explore merely within a few particular forms for
the keyboard - essays numbering many many hundreds. These were
exercises in the minutiae of harmonic complexity. They possess an ele-
gance of logic and style which is prized today, not the least, among our
mathematicians. Tidy as their riddles were - their answers are fresh
today with unexpected novelty and pleasure.

Few other preoccupations brought such consistent rewards. Nations
were founded during that era, and history books record vast military
enterprises side by side with mechanical, scientific and philosophical
refinement and invention. History instills an air of distant quaintness in
our minds, but we revere, celebrate and enjoy intimately the music of
that age today as if it were our own living present. As indeed it is. What
else of their private thought do we know so well as we know their

123

literature and that extraordinary music?

Is it possible we could witness a repetition of one of those historic
chapters? Could we participate in another age of invention devoted to
the curiosity of the intellect and artistic aspiration? Is it possible to enter-
tain the idea of repeating such an epoch, mindful today of some of the
grim alternatives? Might our culture, after its hundreds of years of hard
enterprise and its material triumphs and failures, entertain the mere idea
of less of that and more of this - this kind of intellectual software and
invention?

Technically foreseeable and without waste or further harm to envi-
ronment, it could happen. Indeed, I see an epoch which in many ways
might rival the intellectual curiosity and creativity of the great genera-
tions of European music. I know that the marvels of video and computer
technology would allow this. I know there is a widespread disposition
toward the idea and there are the skills for an unprecedented creativity at
our universities and among the young generations. Hand in hand with
these new dispositions, it is rumored that we stand at the threshold of an
altogether different production and consumption structuring in the mar-
ketplace for arts, high and low.

Epilogue

There remain, no doubt, objections to the picture presented by this book.
Some would call my ideas just more unneeded science fiction. And
again some objection might be due to a misreading of my own beliefs
regarding cybernetic aspects of the computer.

If this is necessary, then, forthwith I will say that I am on the side of
Joseph Weizenbaum, not my friend Marvin Minsky, as to whether or not
computers will . . write really good music or draw highly meaningful

pictures ”* Flatly I will express aloud my disbelief at the implication

of these words. Computers will do no such thing, of themselves - not
ever! Indeed art is a matter of, “judgment - not calculation.”

There are less subtle misunderstandings. There are attitudes that
assume the legitimacy of a Stradivarius or a Steinway as necessary musi-

* Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San
Francisco, 1976), p. 157.

124 Summary and Prospect

cal “machines.” (No one expects a piano to “write really good music,”
fortunately.) But many of those persons, who accept the role of musical
instruments, can see no possibility that a computer may function any-
where in the highly specialized environments of the fine arts or the
popular arts.

The high-water mark of mechanical invention reached in this century
was not high enough. Consensus holds that the two-century-old Stradi-
varius is supreme in its field today. Man-machine responses are nowhere
else as sensitive as those between a man and a violin. The best tech-
nology of this century has not forestalled the decline of our once bold
faith in machines. And even the general idea of technological art is much
discredited, though probably for good reasons which spilled from dem-
onstrations in unlikely places intended to “prove” technological art.

Joseph Weizenbaum’s concern, and the debate, is obviously over
more comprehensive issues. Of course, I’m not qualified to add to a
debate on the serious issue of computer power vs. human reason. I have
wanted only to dispel misapprehensions that could jeopardize the thesis
of this book on the future of an art which is intimately bound to com-
puter technology’s instrumentation.

On the issue of geometry vs. biomorphic form, usually meaning the
hand-drawn image, objections frequently come from those on the other
side of a controversy that can be traced throughout cultural history.

From classic vs. romantic and Apollonian vs. Dionysian divisions, from
Mondrian or Mies van der Rohe vs. Kandinsky or Gaudi, obviously the
earth has accommodated both sides, for a long time - if not peacefully.
Overrating divisions of this sort is a pastime.

Plato contributed these words on behalf of geometric form, appar-
ently an issue in his era:

For I say that these things are beautiful not in relation to something else, but naturally and perma-
nently beautiful, in and of themselves, and give certain characteristic pleasures,. . . And colors of
this sort are beautiful because they have the same character and produce the same pleasures.*

Sometimes the dichotomy between geometric and biomorphic form
manifests as logic vs. sentiment, or abstraction vs. representation. For
some, there is a pervasive distaste for the geometrical image or abstrac-

*PhiIehus, 51c. Quoted in Rickey, Constructivism, p. 9.

125

tion. The complement of this feeling motivates the effort to anthropomor-
phize geometry, abstraction and machines. So Disney required that even
the “abstraction” of a Bach fugue be turned into representations of
parts of the violin, Beethoven into centaurs and nymphs and Stravinsky
into prehistoric monsters in local tar-pits. In truth, these are all obvious
misrepresentations and too clever - like naming a computer “Hal.”*

Geometry and reality are not disparate entities, one cold and imper-
sonal, nor is the other all that lovable, of course. The entire universe, and
the earth’s biosphere of plant and animal, and the idiosyncrasies of geog-
raphy, are in fact, only the “idiosyncrasies” of geometry. All derive from
one geometry, as I see it; all derive from one mind, for all I know.

Because my computer compositions thus far manipulated points,
straight lines or simple constructions of these elements, this does not
spell the computer’s complete visual repertoire. Computer geometry, in-
finitely diverse, as in nature itself, constrains graphic diversity merely as
a limit of resolution. The higher the resolution, the greater the visual
diversity . 0 This axiom is true in X Y Z dimensions of visual space,
sound and the dimension of time as well.

Boundaries of resolution expand year after year as computer memory
expands. Computer technology’s peculiar ominous novelty diminishes
year by year. As surely as the piano’s refinement consistently progressed
over a few hundred years, another process of refinement is occurring
today. The instrumentalities of digital harmony for music and art be-
come progressively more available to the artist and he will use these for
greatness as the artist has consistently used the instruments and the ideas
of each era to recall its greatness.

Long live this revolution.

* See Fantasia and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

°See p. 80, Figure 12. Also consider some of the elaborate detail of Arabesque.

126 Summary and Prospect

Chapter XII

Do It Yourself

This chapter contains the implementation of the same Pascal programs
that were used to generate the digital harmony patterns that illustrate
text in Figures (1) and (13) to be found on pp. 50 and 98. Of course you
should refer to the text of Chapters V and VI to understand the function
of differential dynamics and be aware that patterns generated by these
rudimentary programs are not interesting as one picture in itself but are
basically patterns of motion. In my system, I use the UCSD Pascal ver-
sion 1.5, and in the past, I have used Basic and Fortran. In order to create
digital harmony on your own, you will need a system which runs Pascal
(or, if not, it will be necessary to convert the image generating algorithms
into whatever language you do have); in addition, you should have a
reasonably high-quality CRT display system*

Still 100 x 100 addressable pixels will suffice if you don’t mind all your
designs looking slightly old-fashioned like quaint needlepoint. This is in
fact no laughing matter; to the contrary, a scale of resolution as low as
100, should (and will) render graphics of elegance superior to any I have
yet seen. Again I stress that our interest is no longer with “pretty pic-
tures;’’ we want to create motion that may be pretty, elegant or funny
but not dumb. Action, the subject of this book from end to end, points
the way beyond the obvious shortcomings of twinkle boxes and most
patterning programs. As stated elsewhere, many displays filled with
“boiling’’ action seem quite static nevertheless, due to the pointlessness

*A handbook containing details of these programs in Fortran and Basic, and more general instruc-
tions, will be available soon.

129

of the action or its unimaginative planning or its triviality.

For capturing the action-patterns of these programs, a video recorder
would serve except for a limitation which must be explained this way:
few small systems are fast enough to generate graphics in motion in real
time. The thousands of stepping images of a motion sequence are gener-
ated slowly in small computers; even one image per minute is a rea-
sonable computing speed. At present, home video recording machines
do not take images one frame at a time (as they will soon). So, a movie
camera is needed, with a means of controlling the shutter and film ad-
vance of the camera from your software.

This latter step generally involves a subroutine which can control a
couple of bits on an input/output port, and may have to be written in
assembly language code depending upon the specific high-level language
you are using (see detailed discussions of interfacing cine cameras to
computers in various issues of Tekniques, the Tektronix monthly journal
for graphics users of the 4051).

The simplest differential pattern that we can generate is at column A
of Figure (1) p. 50; see the listing on p. 134. The key variables which
you should set in the Pascal program are NPOINTS, which is the
number of points within one frame; NFRAMES, the number of frames
which the program will make; STEPSTART, controls the starting pattern
beginning the action at frame 1; STEPEND, determines the ending
pattern at frame (NFRAMES). For your initial test, select the following
values NPOINTS: = 60, STEPSTART: =0.0, STEPEND: = 1.0 and
NFRAMES: =240 for an action sequence to run ten seconds on a film
running at the common 24 frames per second rate. Or you could set
NFRAMES: =9 and all the parameters at the values printed in the listing,
to duplicate exactly the nine frames of the illustration, column A Figure
(1) and compare the results.

These listings contain explanatory {comments} so marked. General
remarks about all of the programs will follow these references to each of
the three different variations.

Now, if you look at the listing, p. 135, for Column B & C, notice that
the action is within a circular field and is expressed by polar coordinates;
to generate this type of pattern, a new variable is needed: RADIUS.
Selecting a radius exposes the points to a differential dynamic force

130 Do It Yourself

which increases with the point’s position along the radius. Each point
moves at its own angular rate differentially according to its position
along the radius. For these examples, the degree of differential intro-
duced is predetermined in the program by variable A, and you can
manipulate the equation which gives value to A once you have more
experience with the technique.

Setting STEPEND: = 1.0 and NFRAME:=240 as above will com-
plete one full cycle which returns all the points to their starting position
along the original radius line. Again, if you film this sequence, the run-
ning time will be ten seconds, a rate which will prove to be too fast
to see all of the whole fraction patterns as they occur. Add a zero to the
parameter. NFRAMES:=2400 simply lengthens the period of action by
a factor of ten; you will see how much detail of action is revealed.
Increase NPOINTS:=360 (the value used m Arabesque) to see how
much more detailed the pattern of each frame becomes.

At this point, a footnote of interest: compare types of drawn anima-
tion with this new medium of computer graphics. Were you to draw by
hand the points of this sequence (which you simply could not do, inci-
dentally) you might have the following thoughts about the unmanage-
ability of the task. Bad enough to make 240 drawings, but what about
2400 drawings? Unthinkable. Note that having changed your program
from NFRAMES: = 240, to NFRAMES: = 2400, you merely added one
zero to make 2160 more images. That’s easier than making 2160 draw-
ings, but the point is not to make art easier, of course. The first idea is the
important one to consider; you simply cannot draw this kind of pattern
in motion by any way other than by digital computer graphics. This is an
unprecedented new fact and a new opportunity in the visual arts.

In the Column B & C program, not only is the action within a
circular region as pictured, but the line also wraps around the center. All
of the rose curves of the type R = a sin n (0) may be generated by
some slight modifications of this program. The numerous polar
coordinate type patterns which appear dynamically as “moments” of
harmonic resonance (more orderly in appearance than the immediately
preceding and succeeding patterns) can be generated. For example, see
Figure (5) in which a 4-lobed rose transforms into a 3-lobed rose by a
progression of intermediate, less simple patterns. Refer to the chapter VI

131

discussion of that illustration. TD and RD type parameters can be
written into the above polar coordinate equation controlling theta
and radius.

Figure (13) of Chapter IX on page 98, illustrates the root action prin-
ciple which is used with variations throughout the entire composition of
my film Arabesque. The listing, p. 136 generates a circle of points which
move as outlined in the text. Setting NPOINTS: = 60, as listed, allows
the program to compute reasonably faster than it would if the positions
of 360 points must be calculated. Obviously, wise choices of your op-
tions in selecting values for NPOINTS: and NFRAMES: allows you to
explore these fields of pattern and action most productively.

Again, as with the other examples, setting STEPEND: = 1.0 produces
one complete cycle. Selecting with ingenuity and imagination all the
other values of any algorithm allows you to explore the variety of
dynamic pattern waiting to be mined - like gold - in any differential pat-
tern system such as this.

Reading Chapter IX, the analysis of Arabesque, will serve to suggest
further variations upon this simple program which I explored only for a
period of four or five months. Certainly this program concept was not
deeply “mined” for its fullest possibilities. Perhaps one third of all the
film material that was prepared for the film was rejected and might one
day be used in another film. It is significant to realize how meager my
experience was in exploring the Arabesque material, and how limited all
exploration is to date, in this area of computer graphics*

Here is a vein of “ore” differing from the usual. Mining this vein
may be an infinite process. This “vein” opens to our exploration an
infinity such as the twelve tones of music have to offer. I’ll try another
metaphor: we haven’t explored here as long, or as well, as we have
explored the moon.

For example, you can add to any of the three simple programs listed
on these pages, many forms of mirror image “reflections.” If you do so
you will soon see how to recreate an image sequence like the flip-book.

*The full-page chapter heads are an example of another kind of exploration. The multi-lobed
patterns of the polar-coordinate family presented in Figures (3). (4) and (5) are treated to a few
of the variations that derive from parametric variables and multiple exposures with various color
filters. Each Chapter number is associated with the number of lobes of that pattern.

132 Do It Yourself

By running through a reiteration loop of some sort, with X or Y or both
coordinates inverted, or switching “TD” and “RD” parameters simi-
larly, the combination of original and its reiteration form symmetries
about a vertical or horizontal axis. Symmetries, doublings, rotations,
counterpoints or canons (following one sequence with another and
another in staggered order), these are only the most obvious procedures
among an enormous range of possibilities for pattern, motion pattern
enrichment and variety.

It’s up to you, do it yourself. Do it!

133

PROGRAM COLUMNA;

{ FIGURE (1) COLUMN A - DIFFERENTIAL POINTS ON A STRAIGHT LINE MODULUS }
{ COPYRIGHT 5/25/80 BY JOHN WHITNEY - PREPARED BY PAUL ROTHER }
{ ADAPTED FOR APPLE - II }

CONST DEG = 0. 0174533 ; { CONVERTS DEGREE TO RADIAN }

VAR TIME, STEP,

STEPSTART, STEPEND,

X , Y ,

LENGTH ,XLEFT , YBOTTOM : REAL;

POINT, NPOINTS,

FRAME , NF R AMES : INTEGER;

(*$IAPPLEDRV.TEXT*) { INCLUDE APPLE GRAPHICS DRIVER }

BEGIN

NPOINTS

= 60 ;

NFRAMES

= 9;

STEPSTART

= o;

STEPEND

=1/60;

LENGTH

XLEFT :

: = 170;
:= 38;

YBOTTOM :

:= 18;

FOR FRAME : = 1 TO

NFRAMES DO BEGIN

{ NUMBER OF POINTS IN A DISPLAY }

{ NUMBER OF FRAMES FOR THIS RUN }

{ STEP AT THE FIRST FRAME }

{ STEP AT THE LAST FRAME }

{ LENGTH }

{ X LEFT }

{ Y BOTTOM }

ERASE;

T IME : = ( FRAME-1 ) / ( NFRAMES- 1 );

STEP : = STEPSTART + ( TIME * ( STEPEND - STEPSTART ));

{ STEP IN OVERALL CYCLE ( 1=FULL CYCLE ) }

FOR POINT: = 1 TO NPOINTS DO BEGIN

X : = XLEFT + LENGTH * POINT/NPOINTS ;

Y:= LENGTH * POINT * STEP ;

Y:= YBOTTOM + ( ROUND ( Y ) MOD ROUND ( LENGTH ) );

{ MODULO FUNCTION WITHIN FIELD }
DRAWXYC ROUND ( X ) , ROUND ( Y ) );

END;

CAME RA( 120); { EXPOSE ONE FRAME }

END;

READLN ; { WAIT FOR USER RESPONSE }

TEXTMODE; { RETURN APPLE SYSTEM TO TEXTMODE }

END.

134 Do It Yourself

PROGRAM COLUMNBC ;

{ FIGURE (1) COLUMNS B & C - DIFFERENTIAL POINTS ON A POLAR COORDINATE FIELD }
{ COPYRIGHT 5/25/80 BY JOHN WHITNEY - PREPARED BY PAUL ROTHER }
{ ADAPTED FOR APPLE - II }

CONST DEG=0. 0174533 ;

CONVERTS DEGREE TO RADIAN }

VAR TIME, STEP,

STEPSTART,STEPEND,

A , X , Y ,

RADIUS ,XCENTER, YCENTER : REAL;
POINT, NPOINTS,

FRAME, NFR AMES : INTEGER;

(*$IAPPLEDRV.TEXT*) { INCLUDE APPLE GRAPHICS DRIVER }

BEGIN

NPOINTS : =60;

NFR AMES := 9;

STEPSTART := 0;

STEPEND : = 1/60;

NUMBER OF POINTS IN A DISPLAY }
NUMBER OF FRAMES FOR THIS RUN }
STEP AT THE FIRST FRAME }
STEP AT THE LAST FRAME }

RADIUS := 85;
XCENTER : =140;
YCENTER := 96;

RADIUS }
X CENTER }
Y CENTER }

FOR FRAME : = 1 TO NF R AMES DO
BEGIN

ERASE;

TIME : = ( FRAME-1 ) / ( NFR AMES- 1 );

STEP : = STEPSTART + ( TIME * ( STEPEND - STEPSTART ));

{ STEP IN OVERALL CYCLE ( 1=FULL CYCLE ) }

FOR POINT := 1 TO NPOINTS DO
BEGIN

A : = 360 * STEP * POINT; { + = CCW ROTATION }

X : =XCENTE R + COS(A*DEG) * ( POINT/NPOINTS) * RADIUS ;
Y : = YCENTER + SIN ( A*DEG ) * (POINT/NPOINTS) * RADIUS ;

DR AWXY ( ROUND ( X ) , ROUND ( Y ) ) ;
END;

CAMERAC 120) ;

EXPOSE ONE FRAME }

END;

READLN ; { WAIT FOR USER RESPONSE }

TEXTMODE; { RETURN APPLE SYSTEM TO TEXTMODE }

END.

135

PROGRAM ARABESQUE ;

{ FIGURE (13) - DIFFERENTIAL

{ COPYRIGHT 5/25/80 BY JOHN WHITNEY
{ ADAPTED FOR APPLE - II }

CONST DEG=0. 017^533;

VAR TIME, STEP,

STEPSTART,STEPEND,

A , X , Y , R ,

RADIUS, XCENTER, YCENTER : REAL ;
POINT, NPOINTS,

FRAME, NFRAMES : I NTEGE

(*$IAPPLEDRV.TEXT*)

BEGIN

NPOINTS

= 60;

NFRAMES

= 9;

STEPSTART

= 0;

STEPEND

=1/60;

RADIUS :

= 6 0;

XCENTER :

: = 1 40 ;

YCENTER :

= 96;

POINTS AROUND A CIRCLE X-STEP MODULUS }
- PREPARED BY PAUL ROTHER }

{ CONVERTS DEGREE TO RADIAN }

{ INCLUDE APPLE GRAPHICS DRIVER }

{ NUMBER OF POINTS IN A DISPLAY }
{ NUMBER OF FRAMES FOR THIS RUN }
{ STEP AT THE FIRST FRAME }

{ STEP AT THE LAST FRAME }

{ RADIUS }

{ X CENTER }

{ Y CENTER }

FOR FRAME : = 1 TO NFRAMES DO
BEGIN

ERASE;

TIME : = ( FRAME-1 )/( NFRAMES- 1 );

STEP : = STEPSTART + ( TIME * ( STEPEND - STEPSTART ));

{ STEP IN OVERALL CYCLE ( 1=FULL CYCLE ) }

FOR POINT := 1 TO NPOINTS DO
BEGIN

A : = -90 + 360 * POINT / NPOINTS ;

R : = 3 * RADIUS ;

X : = COS( A*DEG) * RADIUS + POINT * STEP * R ;

X : = XCENTER - (R/2) + ( ROUND( X+ ( R/2) ) MOD ROUND ( R ) );

Y : = YCENTER + SI N ( A*DEG ) * RADIUS ;

DRAWXY ( ROUND ( X ) , ROUND ( Y ) );

END;

CAMERA( 120); { EXPOSE ONE FRAME }

END;

READLN ; { WAIT FOR USER RESPONSE }

TEXTMODE; { RETURN APPLE SYSTEM TO TEXTMODE }

END.

136 Do It Yourself

{ FILE APPLEDR V . TEXT - APPLE GRAPHICS DRIVER WITH TURTLE GRAPHICS }
{ COPYRIGHT 5/25/80 BY JOHN WHITNEY - PREPARED BY PAUL ROTHER }
{ ADAPTED FOR APPLE - II }

{ THIS VERSION. WAS SUGGESTED BY CARL HELMERS. IT IS ADAPTED TO WORK }

{ ON AN APPLE WITH TURTLE GRAPHICS AND A TELEVISION DISPLAY. OTHER }

{ HARDWARE WOULD REQUIRE OTHER MODIFICATIONS. - JW }

USES TURTLEGRAPHICS, TRANSCEND;

PROCEDURE CAMERA(TIME :INTEGER) ; { SHOOT ONE FRAME }

{ CAMERA CONNECTED TO AN//0 GAME I/O PORT }
{ I/O IS MEMORY MAPPED AT C058H & C059H }

VAR J : I NTEGE R ;

ANYCHAR : CHAR ;

CAM : RECORD CASE BOOLEAN OF

TRUE : ( A : INTEGER):

FALSE : ( C : ''CHAR

END;

BEGIN

CAM . A : =- 1 6295 ; {

ANYCHAR:=CAM.C~; {

{

FOR J : = 1 TO 400 DO J:=J; {

C AM . A : =- 1 629 6 ; {

ANYCHAR:=CAM.C~; {

FOR J : = 1 TO TIME DO J:=J;
END;

PROCEDURE DR AWXY ( X , Y : I NTEGE R ) ;
BEGIN

PENCOLOR ( NONE) ;

MOVETOC X , Y ) ;

PEN CO LOR( WHITE) ;

MOVETOC X , Y ) ;

END;

PROCEDURE ERASE;

BEGIN

INITTURTLE;

END;

)

C059H ADDRESS - SET AN#0 OUTPUT ="1" }

OPEN SHUTTER (SET TIME FOR ANY CAMERA) }
EXPERIMENT WILL DETERMINE THE OPTIMUM }
SETTING HERE FOR YOUR CAMERA AND FILM }

WAIT FOR CAMERA (SET FOR YOUR CAMERA) }

C058H ADDRESS - RESET AN//0 OUTPUT = M 0 M }
CLOSE SHUTTER (SET FOR YOUR CAMERA) }

{ WAIT FOR CAMERA AGAIN }

{ DRAW POINT AT X,Y ON APPLE SCREEN }

{ ERASE SCREEN, RETURN TO GRAFMODE }

137

Appendix

Audio-Visual Music:

Color Music- Abstract Film 1944

This article from 1944 (presented here in a very slightly abridged version) offers a breathtakingly
farsighted comprehension of new technology and its impact on the arts. The young Whitney
brothers, having completed their truly revolutionary, modernist Five Abstract Film Exercises, prove
here that they understood, deeply, the philosophieal and sociological ("Marshall McLuhan") im-
plications of the film medium as well as the infant television industry - implications that only now.
40 years later, are finally coming to fruition.

It is perhaps hard for us today, w ith a generation of hindsight schooled by many recent radical
experiments in the auditory and visual arts, to realize how revolutionary the Five Film Exercises
seemed at that time, but many people who witnessed the first screenings of those films (including
sculptor Harry Bertoia and Jacques Ledoux of the Brussels festival) have told me how shocked
audiences were by the "unearthly," "electronic" music and the luminous "neon" images that
seemed to have dropped into our time zone somehow from the science-fiction future.

Another index of the absolute pioneer status of these young artists is their paragraph about the
unfeasibility of full-screen sequences of color without graphic forms. 1 am reminded of the touching
passage in Kandinsky's Reminiscences wherein he describes his fear and trembling upon "discover-
ing" his first nonobjective painting - one of his own representational canvases accidentally turned
on its side in the twilit studio - which he didn't quite know what to make of. Coincidentally, about
that same time (1944) Oskar Fischinger experimented with full-screen color in Color Rhythm and
Radio Dynamics - films he never showed publicly - and Dwinell Grant in New ; York prepared a
Color Sequence which he found too disquieting and shelved for 30 years. But 10 years later, in
the mid-5()s. James Whitney would use full-screen color brilliantly in his Yantra. and more than
20 years later Tony Conrad and Paul Sharks would exploit color flickers in films hailed as break-
throughs by the Structural Film movement. In another dozen years from now, after videodiscs have
published the entire body of audio-visual music (greatly enlarged by that time), then, perhaps, we
will be able to see Five Film Exercises in their true perspective - as the first full-blown works of a
Renaissance in the arts. - W. M.

As technological control of new art resources has matured, so has a
new generation of young people whose environment itself has been a
conditioning factor toward acceptance of these resources as material of
aesthetic experience. The main outlets of creative experience with many
individuals of this generation is somehow channeled in modern technol-
ogy. When this generation seeks a means of self-expression, they quite

138 Appendix

naturally take up photography, engage in amateur radio activity or build
a new automobile of private design from old parts. Little can be said
here of the exact processes involved, but in general, it is now clear that
this "amateurism” as a conditioning factor spreads, as much as anything
else, receptivity to new media of creative expression. This promises
future technology-based arts of great popularity.

Since the development of techniques of animated moving pictures,
an art consisting of movement of visual elements within a temporal
pattern has been a possibility. Such an art would possess all the rich
appeal of music itself. With the development of sound cinematography,
audio-visual relationships in complete harmony and unity of feeling
became possible, foretelling an art utterly unique in this age. The small
but vigorous abstract art movement of today may appear historically as
the precursor to this abstract cinema.

That the sound-drama film occupies the entire present motion picture
industry may be only a temporary condition. Certainly there is promise
of change here with the development of television. With the shuffle that
is bound to accompany the spread of television, emphasis upon the cur-
rently dominant category of filmed drama may subside so as to present
in clearer perspective the full field of the cinema art, in which the com-
mercial drama-film would be seen as only one fragment of a graduated
scale of cinematic art. Such a scale would also include, in various
proportions, the documentary, the surrealist/poetic and the so-called
"abstract” film.

The following remarks are based upon experience acquired during the
past five-years’ work with animated abstract films. These remarks attempt
to clarify certain issues centering around this new art medium based on
technological resources that either are in use or are possible today.

Perhaps no other art received so much attention and was the subject
of such experimentation so prematurely. Leonardo speculated on the
similarity of color and tone in De Sensu. Starting in the seventeenth
century, a line of experimenters with color-organs stretches to the latter
part of the nineteenth century when at last the invention of the in-
candescent lamp and progress in optics made the color organ slightly
more practical.

Today, the existence of a variety of technical means, the imminent

promise of television as an agent of communication to a broad audience,
and the past thirty years of experiment by two diverse schools - the
abstract film group and the experimenters with “color music” - has
brought the medium to the threshold of actuality. Discussion and defini-
tion of its issues and structural problems, therefore, no longer remains
just purely speculative, without practical experience.

The term abstract film , is unfortunate, but still more unfortunately, as
yet no term has been coined to name an art having such unique qualities
that it fits poorly into either music or graphic art categories. Film, though
currently appropriate for the phrase, will become more and more mis-
leading with the increased application of television technology. But the
word abstract has more misleading connotations today than ever before,
since it is widely used in current painting vocabulary.

This medium is no more or less abstract than music, so it should not
be burdened with the issue of abstraction in its very name. That it exists
obviously on a level of abstraction should be a natural assumption, as it
is with music.

While “abstract painting” posits a silent visual art of stasis, the
technological potential of sound film and television dictates greater con-
cern here with the future of a medium uniting kinetic sight and sound.
We will speak of the medium as audio-visual-music for want of a
better name.

Since animation procedures are the means of achieving motion,
the subject of tempo in audio-visual-music will deal with various units
consisting of various quantities of frames. The illusion of movement
is achieved by a series of static images projected in rapid sequence, of
course. This new audio-visual-music image, whether animated frame by
frame or created by other means for screen or television, must adapt its
basic temporal structure to the frequency of the frame projection rate. As
a general principle, both sound and image should have a common time
unit which would be the frequency of projected frames. Music notation,
where it is used, would thus be converted from metronomic time values
to frame-unit values.

The fact that movement is not continuous actually limits rhythmic
possibilities in the visual domain relative to that of the sound. For exam-
ple, the minimum time unit must be one frame (1 /24th second), while

140 Appendix

the only possible next longer unit must be twice that amount or two
frames of image. On the other hand, while music notes of shorter dura-
tion than 1 / 24th second occur infrequently, notes of intermediate dura-
tion or periodicity (between l/24th and twice and three times that l/24th
fraction) are common. And so the animated image cannot be easily syn-
chronized to these intermediate frequencies. Thus, it may be reasoned
that film possesses an inherent rhythm of its own which often is
immutable.

Another determinant of audio-visual-music is the persistence-of-
vision, and certain natural differences in our response to rhythm by eye
and ear. With regard to our response to rapid rhythmic motions and
alterations, some are even painful to the eye.

A third determinant and difference between image-time and sound-
time is the relation of graphic space to time. Space/time considerations
are forced into a special kind of preeminence. No movement exists
that is oblivious to time. No shape - no space - eludes movement con-
siderations that are free of time considerations. Space and time here
are inseparable in a very real sense. A tiny animated shape creating a
rhythmic movement in a given space may produce one effect. The same
action magnified many times, so as to fill the entire screen area, pro-
duces a radically different temporal experience even though the time of
each may be exactly the same. The difference is qualitative to a degree
that variation upon a thematic idea is not clear by simple magnification
or reduction of size.

Experiment has indicated how ineffective full-screen passages of
color, without other graphic form, can be - how ineffectual these are as a
device to carry any rhythmic idea. Unless they are supported by a strong
musical reinforcement, the effect is surprisingly ambiguous. Such se-
quences of various fields of color, which might be introduced as a the-
matic idea later to be subjected to variation and development, would
seem to be foredoomed. And this observation reflects the apparent fail-
ure of all color-music experiments that treated color as an independent
visual entity having no relation to form or shape.

What then can be the role of color in audio-visual-music? It is still
the most vital element of the total sensory experience. Color structure
united with a graphic-time structure is comparable to the relationship

141

between orchestration and theme structure of a musical composition: the
two contribute to a unified whole. Just as orchestration provides the
symphonic composer with a large textural vocabulary with which he
may build richly or thinly to his structural needs, so it is with color for
the audio-visual-music composer.

The fallacy of mechanically translating previously composed music
into some visual “equivalent” is established repeatedly in critical writ-
ings on the subject. A more fruitful, less mechanistic approach is pos-
sible today, for truly creative possibilities arise when the image structure
dictates or “inspires” sound structure and vice versa, or when they are
simultaneous conceptions. This obviously is best realized when both
parts have common creative origins.

This unified creative potential is available today, even for the artist,
as sound-track writing or synthesizing devices, manageable by one per-
son, appear on the horizon along with simplified animation techniques.

The generally accepted assumption that the cinema must be an
industrial-cooperative art, is least likely to be so with audio-visual-music.
The individual artist plays a role here as freely as if he were a painter.

The artist’s access to affordable equipment is assured. Amateur cine
equipment compares well in quality today with that of the industry.

There already exist small enterprises that are prepared to supply special
processing, sound recording and duplicating services to small-scale
limited-budget filmmakers. The remaining technological problem for the
independent artist/composer is somehow to secure final perfection of
these new means.

The role that television can play in the development of audio-visual-
music probably cannot be underestimated. Undoubtedly the most striking
quality of the television program is its intense realism; the realism of
spot news and spontaneous programs of all sorts. But the by-product of
this very spontaneity is disorganization - structurelessness as com-
pared with music. It will have to be dealt with in much the same manner
as radio deals with structureless programming, by ample use of music.
The so-called music bridge and incidental music of radio serves this
purpose. The relatively unorganized spontaneous portions of the radio
program are carefully sandwiched between periods of music. Even though
it had the enormous accumulation of all western civilization’s music

142 Appendix

to draw upon, radio found it necessary to employ composers to supply
radio’s specific needs.

It is safe to assume that television will discover a similar need for
an audio-visual equivalent to radio’s music bridge. The need will begin
a search beyond temporary solutions that are motivated by expediency.
The artist with a sense of the deeper meaning of structure can make the
distinction between a temporary solution and a structural solution. Tech-
nological trinkets in the form of kaleidescopes and other mechanical-
optical devices which will fill the television screen with arbitrary pattern
and are related to music mechanically, if at all, are certainly not the
"structural” solution to providing graphic and musical order to television.

Television, insofar as it performs as an integral part of the new times
and its society, will not only employ hours of audio-visual-music but it
will perform individual works of the contemporary composers.

Appendix

Audio-Visual Music

and Program Notes 1946

This artists' statement and program notes for Five Film F.xercises were prepared for the catalogue
of the first Art in Cinema festival at the San Francisco Museum of Art (Fall. 1946)- an historic
occasion on which a whole range of European avant-garde films from the Museum of Modern Art
in New York were screened beside new work by young American filmmakers. This festival became
an annual event lasting into the 50s. and this showcasing of classic and new work in a museum
setting provided the catalyst for young painters like Harry Smith and Jordan Belson to turn to film
and their own personal versions of “audio-visual music."

The statement of John and James Whitney exhibits a mature understanding of their art in the
context of modern painting, and reaffirms their healthy attitude toward “the machine" as a potential
instrument of art rather than a necessary menace to traditional handmade art product. The notes on
the F.xercises demonstrate clearly how carefully those films were planned and executed according to
principles of advanced music and visual theory. - W. M.

Section One:

Each individual who has identified himself with the abstract film
medium has begun from scratch and devised every detail of his technical
means. Inevitably, form under this circumstance has been preeminently
interrelated with technique. Form is weak or it flowers just so well as the
means are integrated. The perfection of means, however, does not pro-
ceed along a simple forward path of progress, because this art is not a
science with a rationale more than any other. And it is actually a very
new thing that so much technology must be brought to bear upon an art
form as it is in the field of the cinema. Perhaps the abstract film can
become the freest and the most significant art form of the cinema. But
also, it will be the one most involved in machine technology, an art
fundamentally related to the machine.

In our work, we have continuously sought an equilibrium between

144 Appendix

technical limitations and creative freedom. We have partially achieved it,
lost it again, and now search for it once more at a higher level. Our first
film made with an optical-printer but without sound, is a case in point;
the equipment and the state of our general technique determined a set of
limitations which have never since been so circumscribed. Yet within
those limitations was found an area of freedom open to creative manipu-
lation which has never again been so vast. This film rapidly acquired
unity and simplicity.

With our expanded means, including sound, today we endeavor to
reestablish that equilibrium. This, we believe, has become possible as we
accept the technical means at our disposal as adequate and proceed to
widen the area of freedom within discovered and accepted limitations.
The films produced over the five-year period since our first, seldom have
been completed before their value to us as experiments were negated by
new experiments following a new approach to form and with altered and
sometimes improved equipment. Thus, they frequently manifest one
technical quality or another that is subtly out of order with their formal
organization. Still, they are better described as exercises than experi-
ments, for they are rehearsals for a species of audio-visual performances
that we can very well visualize now.

Section Two:

It is a commonplace to note that film and sound today have become a
permanent unity. We are attracted by the prospects of an idiom as
unified, bi-sensorially, as the sound film can be.

Naturally, we have wanted to avoid weakening that unity, which
would be the very essence of an abstract film medium.

It occurred to us that an audience could bring with it its own dis-
unity ing distractions in the form of numerous past associations and
preconceptions were we to use previously composed music in relation to
our own abstract image compositions. We, therefore, tried the simplest,
least common, primitive music we could find. But another source for
disunity became apparent. In this case, the dominant source of distrac-
tion was a contradiction between the origins (the players, instruments,
time, place, etc.) of this kind of music and animated image.

Thereafter, little thought was given to any other consideration than to

145

search for a method of creating our own sound by some means near as
possible to the image animation process, technically and in spirit.

Section Three:

The sound track of all our films to date was created synthetically by the
device which came into being as a result of these conclusions. Without
attempting to describe it in detail here,* its principle resembles less a
musical instrument than certain devices used for charting the rise and
fall of ocean waves. Pendulums instead of waves create the ebb and flow
movement. This motion is greatly demagnified and registered on a nar-
row space of the motion picture film provided for a sound track. The
patterns themselves generate tones in the sound projector. The instru-
ment has a selection of some thirty pendulums adjusted in frequency
relationship to each other so as to form a scale. They can be swung
singly or in any combination.

We value the instrument despite certain distinct limitations for an
assortment of reasons. An immediate practical one is that it as much as
provides us with a means where otherwise there would be none at all.
Sound recording of original music even at the 16 mm. scale is prohibi-
tively expensive and presents enormous difficulties for the amateur.

Some other reasons have to do with adaptability of the instrument
to our purposes. In composing the sound, we seek to exploit a spatial
quality characteristic of the instrument which reinforces that effect of
movement in space which we seek to achieve in the image. Since both
image and sound can be time scored to fractions of a single motion
picture frame, there is opened a new field of audio-visual rhythmic pos-
sibilities. The quality of the sound evokes no strong image distraction
such as was observed in other music. Consequently, the sound is easily
integrated with the image. The scale of the instrument is adjustable to
any intervals we may choose including quarter tones and smaller. This
permits use of graduated ascending or descending tonal series. They cor-
respond in quality of feeling and variability to certain types of image
series, such as, for example, an enlarging or diminishing shape, an

* A description can be found in Leon Becker's article “Synthetic Sound and Abstract Image"
Hollywood Quarterly, V. 1, #1 (October, 1945) pp. 95-96.

146 Appendix

ascending or descending shape, or a color series.

In concluding this section it should be observed that there is for us
perhaps more personal freedom than is possible in any other motion
picture field today. Our sound and image technique provide a complete
means accessible to one creator. We believe in the future of the abstract
film medium as one differing from the others in that it demands none of
the large scale collaboration typical in present motion picture fields.

Section Four:

We seek to extend certain principles which have evolved over the past
forty years by the work and thought of such men as Marcel Duchamp
and Piet Mondrian.

During this time, in painting, spatial limitations of the particular,
human, real world have generally given way to a concern with a concep-
tual simultaneity of space-time. Mondrian sought “a truer vision of real-
ity” by destroying the particular of representation, thus liberating space
and form in terms of equilibrium.* By a mechanical destruction of the
particular we believe it possible to approach anew this problem. We seek
a new equilibrium - an equilibrium on a temporal frame as in music.

And we seek a balance of contrasting plastic movements.

Obviously Western Art forms have been no less determined and lim-
ited by their accepted creative means than our work is limited and its
character is determined by our mechanical means. Our very realm of
creative action is implicit in the machine. Emphasis is necessarily upon a
more objective approach to creative activity. More universal. Less par-
ticular. More so by virtue of the inherent impersonal attribute of the
machine. We discern a creative advantage here similar to that deliber-
ately sought after by both Mondrian and Duchamp, however opposed
their respective points of view; Duchamp, an anti-artist, and Mondrian,
seeking a purity of plastic means.

But the machine is yet a poorly integrated, clumsily handled inven-
tion else man would not be face to face with his destiny by it today.
Personal contact with new creative fields by way of the machine would
hardly be worth struggling after were it not for the tremendous variety of

* Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art , New York, 1945.

new clay to be found there, its universality and its close kinship with
modern experience.

Our animating and sound producing devices do not respond to our
touch as a musical instrument responds to the virtuoso. Aside from our
own admitted inexperience there are clear-cut historical reasons for this.
The devices of art and music which have made Western Art forms pos-
sible, originated in antiquity and have evolved slowly paralleling the life
of that culture. The introduction of the machine in such proportions as
has taken place only in this century constitutes a quantitative change
effecting a distinct qualitative revolution. The motion picture camera is
no more an improved paint brush than our sound track device is an
improved musical instrument.

It is our opinion that the work and ideas of Marcel Duchamp with
his underlying principles, against hand painting, and, a studied exploita-
tion of the mechanisms of chance, make a significant esthetic contribu-
tion to the advancement of this “qualitative revolution.” Perhaps his
concept of irony provides a clue to the whole future of machine realized
art. He defines his meaning of irony as ”... a playful way of accepting
something. Mine is the irony of indifference. It is a meta-irony.”* Our
own experience has been that this corresponds very closely to the correct
philosophical disposition by which the resources of the machine may be
accepted and employed.

Notes on the 6 6 Five Abstract Film Exercises”

by John and James Whitney

First Sound Film, Completed Fall 1943:

Begins with a three-beat announcement, drawn out in time, which there-
after serves as an imageless transition figure dividing the sections of
the film. Each new return of this figure is condensed more and more in
time. Finally it is used in reverse to conclude the film. There are four
sections constructed from the same three thematic ideas. They depend

* Quoted in Harriet and Sidney Janis. “Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist," View, Series 5,
#1 (March. 1945). p. 23.

148 Appendix

upon subtle alterations of color and juxtaposition of these three distinct
themes for contrast.

This film was produced entirely by manipulation of paper cutouts
and shot at regular motion picture camera speed instead of hand-animating
one frame at a time. The entire film, two hundred feet in length, was
constructed from an economical twelve feet of original image material.

Fragments, Spring 1944: These two very short fragments were also
made from paper cutouts. At this time we were developing a means of
controlling this procedure with the use of pantographs. While we were
satisfied with the correlation of sound and image, progress with the
material had begun to lag far behind our ideas. These two were left
unfinished in order to begin the films which follow.

Fourth Film, Completed Spring 1944: Entire film divided into four
consecutive chosen approaches, the fourth being a section partially
devoted to a reiteration and extension of the material of the first and
second sections.

Section One: Movement used primarily to achieve spatial depth. An
attempt is made to delay sound in a proportional relationship to the depth
or distance of its corresponding image in the screen space, that is, a
near image is heard sooner than one in the distance. Having determined
the distant and near extremes of the visual image, this screen space is
assigned a tonal interval. The sound then moves along a melodic line in
continuous glissando back and forth, slowing down as it approaches
its point of alteration in direction. The line would resemble slightly a
diminishing spiral as viewed on a flat plane from the side. This section
concludes with a frontal assault of all imagery with an interacting
tonal accent.

Section Two: Consists of four short subjects in natural sequence. They
are treated to a development in terms alternately of contraction and
expansion or halving and doubling of their rhythm. Sound and visual
elements are held in strict synchronization. Color is directed through a
blue to green dynamic organization.

Section Three: A 15-second visual sequence is begun every five seconds,
after the fashion of canon form in music. This constitutes the leading

149

idea, a development of which is extended into three different repetitions.
This section is built upon the establishment of complex tonal masses
which oppose complex image masses. The durations of each are progres-
sively shortened. The image masses are progressively simplified and their
spatial movement increasingly rapid.

Section Four: Begins with a statement in sound and image which at its
conclusion is inverted and retrogresses to its beginning. An enlarged
repetition of this leads to the reiterative conclusion of the film.

Fifth Film, Completed Spring 1944: Opens with a short canonical
statement of a theme upon which the entire film is constructed. Followed
by a rhythmical treatment of the beginning and ending images of this
theme in alternation. This passage progresses by a quickening of rhythm,
increasing in complexity and color fluctuation. After a complete repeat
of this, there follows a deliberate use of the original theme in a canon
form, slow and with sound counterpart also in canon. The sound thereafter
is entirely constructed upon the material derived from this section. The
canon is repeated in contrasting variation by means of color and leads
into a further development of the early rhythmical ideas on beginning
and ending images.

A second section begins after a brief pause. Here an attempt is made
to pose the same image theme of the first section in deep film screen
space. As the ending image recedes after an accented frontal flash onto
the screen it unfolds itself repeatedly, leaving the receding image to con-
tinue on smaller and smaller. The entire section consists of variations on
this idea and further development of the rhythmical ending image ideas
which recur in the first section.

(From technical notes, written in 1947, which were also published in Art
in Cinema , 1947.)

150 Appendix

Appendix

Moving Pictures and

Electronic Music 1959

This article was written in 1959 for Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert's serial music jour-
nal die Reihe, where it was published in Vienna in a German translation. Five years later, an English
edition of that issue appeared in the U.S. with this article retranslated from the German text back
into English. Needless to say, some humorous and embarrassing passages resulted. The text printed
here is John Whitney's original English version, not a translation. It provides the fullest description
of the pioneer pendulum “electronic" music which the Whitney brothers were creating before
magnetic tape made possible what we know as electronic music today. - W. M.

The year 1940 marks the beginning of this short history. It might be
called a piece of Western frontier history for there are signs of a frontier
in it - in one sense - and there is a note of isolation.

Stimulated by the avant-garde filmmakers of France and Germany of
the early twenties, I began alone and was soon joined by my brother
James, making what were then called abstract films. My point of view
was that of a composer; my brother was a painter. I had been casually
introduced to the Schoenberg twelve-tone principals by friends in Paris a
year earlier. Other than this brief exposure to a modem trend of music
composition, we had Ernst Krenek’s pamphlet, Studies in Counterpart ,
plus recorded music to listen to, including Pierrot Lunaire; the pieces for
piano Opus 19 and the Opus 37 String Quartet of Arnold Schoenberg;
also Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and violin concerto. It may be said that we
were more broadly acquainted with the temper and spirit of modern art,
including the Bauhaus in Germany.

As unprecedented comparatively as our art was, the tools were also
new or actually awaiting invention. We looked upon toolmaking as a nat-
ural aspect of our creative occupation. We treated this facet of endeavor

151

with respect, designing with care even the appearance of an instrument,
for example. We accepted, of course, the probability that formal con-
siderations would somehow evolve as a result of an interactive play
between ourselves and the character of these tools. And to bear this out,
it will be seen that certain formal ideas did come directly from the sub-
sonic approach that we found for producing the sound of our films.

Our subsonic sound instrument consisted of a series of pendulums
linked mechanically to an optical wedge. The function of the optical
wedge was the same as that of the typical light valve of standard optical
motion picture sound recorders. No audible sound was generated by the
instrument. Instead, an optical sound track of standard dimensions was
synthetically exposed onto film which after processing could be played
back with a standard motion picture projector.

The pendulum, whose natural sinusoidal oscillation is fixed by the
location and size of its weight, constituted our limited source of tone
generation. Though the frequency range of our set of pendulums ex-
tended only somewhat over four octaves, from a base frequency of one
second, the extremely slow drive mechanism which passed the raw film
over the light slit at the recording optics was also variable over a range
of several octaves. By changing the drive speed the pendulums as a
group could be shifted up or down the frequency spectrum.

The pendulums were individually tunable. We soon found that we
could watch the comparatively slow swing of these pendulums and
adjust their weights to any of the common interval relationships. For
example, it was easy to count two strokes of one pendulum and adjust
another to make exactly three strokes in the same period; both pendulums
swinging past a nodal point in unison every 2nd and 3rd oscillation
respectively. This tuning would sound the interval of the 5th. Due to the
design of the mechanical linkage any number of pendulums could be
played simultaneously. The linkage in effect “mixes” sinusoidal oscilla-
tions without undue distortion.

Composing for an instrument with the thinness of tone spectra as
ours had determined a need to exploit our resources with ingenuity and
to their fullest. There were other reasons, of course, but this sense
of a need for extreme economy motivated avoiding any tuning of the
pendulum set to a “scale” that would not be used in its entirety.

152 Appendix

As a formal point, then, we chose to tune the instrument to a serial
row that would be different with each composition. This serial row might
be played out sequentially depending upon horizontal considerations
of the music structure. Also, all or any part of the row could be played
simultaneously. This way a vertical note mixture (not a chord) would be
produced, the timbre or components of which could be continuously
varied by bringing in and out different groupings of frequencies. The
attack and decay of the tones of the instrument could be controlled by
literally starting and stopping the pendulums either abruptly or slowly.
Vertical or horizontal aspects of a composition were thus structurally
interrelated in a peculiarly meaningful way.

Furthermore, since the drive speed was so slow (sometimes as slow
as one motion picture frame in sixty seconds) it was possible to start and
stop a sequence of perhaps 20 pendulums within one frame; that is,
within one twenty-fourth part of a second at playback speed. It was even
possible to play a small pendulum or to correlate in different ways vari-
ous (literally counted by eye) numerical orderings of cycles. We soon
observed that microclusters of transient tone sequences produced this
way presented very rewarding compositional possibilities. These tight
clusters produced distinctive timbres; yet if the elements of the groups
were progressively lengthened in duration they became audible as
discrete note sequences of rhythmic order. We found that here was
established a continuum from rhythm to pitch. Our instrument could
encompass the range. It became a structural foundation of our music
compositions.

There is one other aspect of the sound techniques that deserves men-
tion before proceeding to a discussion of image and space concepts. At
an early point in our filmmaking a method was devised to record four
channels of sound. This was done primarily to facilitate recordings of
structures of a degree of complexity otherwise physically impossible to
perform even at the extremely slow recording rate we employed. Sec-
ond, third, and fourth records were exposed on the sound track at differ-
ent recording speeds according to our notational system.

In this way it became possible to conceive still another facet of the inter-
relationship of time and pitch. The act of performing on this instrument
- essentially starting and stopping the pendulums and controlling

153

their amplitude - could be governed by the instrument time (i.e., frame
speed) or by the constant clock time. Assuming a given clock-time
interval, then pitch and duration became a function of the drive speed of
the machine, i.e., the recording rate. Thus pitch ratios and time ratios
were drawn still closer together and became more accessible as compo-
sitional elements. (Indeed the continuum of pitch, timbre, and rhythm
relationships of this machine was unprecedented in Western musical re-
sources and anticipates the application of computer technology to musi-
cal composition. Our Five Abstract Film Exercises were made under
these auspices - note added in 1973 by John Whitney.)

Our activities were not alone musical since our first interest had been
to compose abstract graphic compositions with a time structure as in
music. Before the above musical researches were begun, we had made
several silent abstract films.

The earliest film to be completed consisted of 24 variations upon a
graphic matrix. This matrix was given action potential by an extremely
simple animation idea. The illustration (fig. 1) shows a diagram of the
complex matrix which was actually never revealed on film in this static

Figure 1

configuration. This matrix was broken down as shown in fig. 2 and pro-
duced with an air brush. The forms of the matrix served as a simple

154 Appendix

positive and negative stencil as shown in fig. 3. The resulting animation
cards with phases and movement were then photographed in sequence
onto black-and-white film.

This film strip was in fact one of perhaps many possible serial per-
mutations from the original total static matrix. We devised an optical
printer in which this film strip could be rephotographed onto color film
using color filters; either in normal direction or retrogression, right side
up or inverted, or mirrored. Graphically here was a parallel to the trans-
positions and inversions and retrogressions of the twelve-tone technique
Seeing this short film back from the laboratory for the first time, my
brother and I experienced the most gratifying stimulation of our entire
filmmaking activities. Within its extreme limitations, here was a gener-
ous confirmation of our compositional principles; the permutability of
the simple graphic material permitted a great variety of compositional
structure. We were soon engaged in elaborations upon the matrix ideas
which presupposed some form of serial permutation to be juxtaposed
dynamically against itself by retrogression, inversion, and mirroring.

The following years were a time of continuous discovery of steps
toward a more fundamental graphic element. The static matrix ideas
were modified then supplanted by other discoveries.

155

Appendix

ASID Talk and

Belgian Competition 1963

This talk delivered at the Catalina Design Conference in 1962 affirms the position that “motion
graphics" is a complex new field which can only be exploited properly through the sensitive use of
technological instruments - a stand against the intuitive handmade films of the music-illustration
animators, and a stand in favor of the “gageteers" which these animators (especially Fischinger)
had spoken out against, feeling that machinery would hamper artistic instincts or substitute mechan-
ical regularity for nuance and mystery.

In his assessment of the 1963 Knokke competition (originally published in the same issue of
Film Culture ), Whitney announces clearly the complementary principle which will govern the aes-
thetics of his later work: the essence of the time/movement/development factor in motion graphics
must be consistent “permutations" of the basic material, not just a random collection of diverse
effects strung together to musical accompaniment. - W. M.

A.S.I.D. Talk-Design Conference, Catalina, 1962

When a film title in the tradition that Saul Bass has done so much to
establish, has interesting articulation, it usually succeeds as a title. On
the other hand, if it is lacking effective motion or articulation it might as
well have been a book jacket, at best, perhaps like those that Alvin
Lustig made. This matter of articulation is what I refer to as Motion
Graphics and it is distinctly a new problem in the field of design; so
little explored in fact that designers must approach it with caution and
the proper sense of adventure. Film titles have been sold to clients; sold,
approved and paid for, that must have looked superb in the storyboard
layouts. But the storyboard would be at best a series of static drawings
ostensibly to suggest or imply the motion that was conceived. If in
production, this action is not realized, or was unimaginative to begin
with, very, very impressive storyboards from the point of view of still
graphic design may still be still graphic design when they reach the
screen - we say the work is not dynamic. It may be good graphics - it is
not good Motion Graphics.

156 Appendix

Now how does one delineate motion graphics? Abstract filmmakers
have been pondering this question - stabbing at it in the dark of projec-
tion rooms since the early twenties. Man Ray achieved a brief triumph in
this direction forty years ago. He simply stood starched white collars on
end on a phonograph turntable (a trick in itself) and filmed the turning
spiraling white shapes against a black background. The camera and film
was simply given to him. Man Ray showed this film to slightly delirious
gatherings of dadaist sports while a phonograph in the theatre played the
“Skater’s Waltz.” Truly this was a triumphant moment of motion
graphics, predating sound motion pictures.

About every abstract filmmaker since, who has had his own modest
success, has come by it with almost as much fortuitousness. That is
putting it rather crudely; but it is so that some have achieved high
moments on film by swirling a mixture of incompatible paints in a bar-
rel, or scratching, biting, crayoning and otherwise torturing raw motion
picture film without using a camera at all. Others have hung other
people’s sculpture on invisible strings and let them turn in front of a
camera, still others have filled space with wads of colored plastic and
such and set spotlights moving and filmed the reflections and refractions
moving on the wall.

I have listed this hodgepodge of techniques to emphasize that if you
want to compose an abstract film you just can’t pick up any thread of
tradition winding back into the past. And you can’t walk into a store and
buy an instrument that plays abstract design. A camera is of no use in
this respect; more than a phonograph would be of use to a composer.
Abstract filmmaking then (the pure art of motion graphics as opposed to
film titles, which is an application of art) is a new art which demands
complex tools.

Now to digress a moment: Before the war, I contracted what at that
time was a common fever to make film “Symphonies.” Joris Ivens and
others made these films, and always called them “Symphonies,” (just
why - I couldn’t say since they were always such little films - hardly a
movement of a Symphony). I found that if you go out with a motion
picture camera and shoot nature, you’ll be surprised how little real
action you can get. Especially if you know as anyone should that Slavko
Vorkapich had already shot all the ocean and clouds that need shooting

157

for all time - ever! And Ivens had already shot too many rain drops and
riverlets. “What else on Earth moves?” you ask yourself. Nature, all in
all presents a surprisingly static image to the cameraman who wants to
make “Symphonies,” abstract ones, that is, where animals and humans
don’t fit.

I have brought this up only to make the following ironic observations
that our concepts of nature and the universe have become dynamic.

We know in this Non-Aristotelian age (to borrow a phrase) that time and
motion or, time/motion make the scene today.

Now I might quote here from Gyorgy Kepes’s The New Landscape or
other books of art philosophy. Instead, I need only go to the grocery
store and pick up a copy of Harper’s and read to you what Sir Kenneth
Clark of the London National Gallery has to say.* “Art and science are
not, as used to be supposed, two contrary activities, but draw on many of
the same capacities of the human mind. . . . Artist and scientist alike are
trying to give concrete form to dimly apprehended ideas.” Sir Kenneth
quotes Dr. Bronowski as saying “All science is the search for unity
in hidden likeness, and the starting point is an image because then the
unity is before our mind’s eye.” He gives us the example of Copernicus’s
notion of the solar system which was inspired by the old astrological
image of man with the signs of the zodiac distributed about his body.
Then Sir Kenneth continues: “Our Scientists are no longer as anthropo-
morphic as that; but they still depend on humanly comprehensible
images, and the valid symbols of our time, invented to embody some
scientific truth, have taken root in the popular imagination.” Here in a
nutshell is background for abstract art. But notice that here we can also
perceive the timely validity of the abstract image in motion. The nuclear
scientist will agree readily that he is concerned with dimly apprehended
ideas of forces and energies and particles in motion. His artist contem-
porary should (and does not) have any great facility to create image in
motion. To repeat: our concepts of the universe have become overwhelm-
ingly dynamic. The valid symbols of our time possess this dynamism
implicit in them, and I am concerned with motion graphics because I feel
the need for explicit motion in graphics as against the implicit motion

*“Art and Society." Harper s, v. 233 (August, 1961) p. 81.

158 Appendix

of the painter’s canvas.

The search for a viable system of motion graphics has ranged far and
wide among abstract filmmakers. Here and there we have had it on our
conscience that we had become too much involved in mere technology.

It has been a sensitive point with some to hear a challenge, that goes like
this: “If you are so damned interested in this kind of film why don’t you
make films, instead of messing around with all the gadgetry.’’ For better
or worse, I have resolved this question in my own mind. I decided last
year to engage in the construction of bigger and more elaborate gadgets.

My point of departure would seem to be at the crossroads where
computer designers abandoned mechanics altogether and introduced
electronics. This turn in itself was fortuitous, since it made obsolete a
$33,000 device which was then placed in surplus which I can now buy
for less than $200. I am told it is one of the more sophisticated mechan-
ical analogue computers of specialized function that were produced
during the last war. It happens to be an “Anti-Aircraft Gun Director.’’

It contains a beautiful network of cams that are variable and made an
exceedingly versatile two dimensional coordinate design instrument -
with a few alterations. I have not studied the history of cam linkage
deeply, yet it is interesting to observe again and again all the way back
through the 18th Century that cams have been assembled variously to
trace intriguing designs on paper. Yet through all this time no one seems
to have found much use for these designs other than to decorate gilt
edge bonds and currency. It seems to be characteristic of this time, how-
ever, that innumerable so-called blind alleys submerged by industrial-
ization revolutions are eventually rediscovered. I think of Art Nouveau
glass or Thonet bentwood furniture.

Who knows — perhaps the abandoned cam may have something new
to offer as a rediscovery. My experience would seem to bear this out.

I presently earn a living using these devices in films and also in archi-
tectural decorations. This may account somewhat for my rash decision
to build more versatile cam machines.

At any rate, I am trying to erect a total motion graphic system. If I
were a composer like Arnold Schoenberg, at least I might arrive at a
system without having to invent the symphony orchestra in order to hear
my system applied. Yet that advantage already has been lost to many

159

modern composers. Karlheinz Stockhausen must penetrate deeply into
the field of technical invention if he persists with electronic music. So I
am not alone when I find that if I must make a system, I must also simul-
taneously invent machines.

Now let me try to explain some of the philosophy of a “gadgeteer”
and I will be through:

In the first place we need only look at the twelve-tone scale of the
alphabet to realize what versatility is possible from a permutational sys-
tem. So I am looking for a permutational system of graphics. The first of
the little silent films shown here tonight is an example of rudimentary,
permutational graphics. The entire film was made from one rectangle
and one circle in one position in the film frame. All other positions of
the circle and rectangle are achieved by inversion and mirroring the film
strip from the original positions. The action too is a serial configuration
that undergoes permutation by reverse direction, skip printing etc.

But this little film suffers from limitations which suggests that as a
system of composing it could be soon exhausted of fresh possibilities
and thus die. So the second requirement for a system of graphics might
state that it must be viable. Somehow the ideal system must offer resis-
tance so that with every new approach the composer finds before him
a challenge.

For example, risking oversimplication of history, it may be said
that after a few hundred years during which Western musical culture
evolved, this challenge in music composition has come to resemble
nothing so much as a tidy problem in mathematics. Rules have accumu-
lated in profusion and the challenge is there as any first year harmony
student will agree.

Finally, I am looking for a graphic system that will produce simplic-
ity and complexity at one and the same time. This would be hard to
explain in terms of graphics. Another meaning of the word “articulate”
refers to speech; to enunciate distinctly Speech poorly articulated is
garbled speech. The communication specialists refer to all elements in
a message that do not contribute to the message as noise. Now for the
purely sensuous appeal of texture and pattern there is need for complex-
ity in motion graphics. But simultaneously there is need for simplicity
for the sake of articulation and communication. Still there must be no

160 Appendix

noise in the system.

Now what constitutes noise if the message happens to be a music
composition? Of course, it might be a jet passing overhead or hum in the
amplifier. But it could be clumsy orchestration in which the clarity of the
musical ideas have been simply spoiled with unnecessary doubling of
voices and generally inept composing. This too is noise, I think, by the
communications definition.

Inept and unnecessary embellishment also spoil the message in
graphic art, obviously. Yet judicious use of texture and pattern can be an
aid to the message. In motion graphics the problem is compounded by
the fact that all texture if it is static, looks static. There is a disparity
between action and any static element in the frame that always seems
irreconcilable and therefore contributes only noise. The problem of tex-
ture, familiar to the animator, is only magnified here. Thus for the sake
of unity and clarity of the message, action in terms of the total frame
must be considered. So, the third feature of my system seeks to involve
the whole frame in a species of multiplex action that still must be simple
and unified in its total effect.

Now a word about the film that is to follow. It is a catalog of some
effects I have begun to explore with my latest equipment. I wish only to
say that it consists of film which I am making by the yard these days.
One piece is spliced to the next without any deep logic of sequence.

I would not want to imply that any of these lofty ideals of which I
have been speaking are realized in this film; or are even near realization.

An Abstract Filmmaker’s View of the Belgium Experimental Film
Competition (1963) and All

Film competitions of this sort are notoriously tiresome affairs. Some
filmmakers are downright cruel - if the well-being of their audience is a
matter of concern to them in the least. So experienced competition-goers
learn to walk out early. I observed that they develop a precise sensitivity
to each film’s tedium quotient and they often leave in sizeable numbers a
few seconds after the titles. They even behave this badly when the
abstract films come on. Indeed, at Knokke the film which may have won
the loudest objections from the smallest audience was an abstract film.
This general category did not however receive in total the most numer-

ous demonstrations of audience distaste. Perhaps that is only because
there were so very few abstract films in competition.

I had gone all the way to Belgium to get some perspective on the
world state of abstract filmmaking. Now the big question seemed to be:
does the species really exist at all in the contemporary world of cinema?
For the few films which sensibly fit into that area by definition certainly
presented nothing that was not more imaginatively realized in 1958 or
even in 1949. Were I not somewhat prepared for this and predisposed to
regard any evidence of decline quite differently than one might ex-
pect, I’d have been truly discouraged. More about that optimistic
disposition later.

There is something illogical about the pattern of growth (or decline)
one sees if for example he merely reviews in sequence the entries and
prize winners of the three Belgium Experimental Film Competitions.

The 1949 prize winners were predominantly abstract films and I believe
the view was rather widespread then that the winning films were as much
a foretaste of the future as they were themselves any great achievement
of film art. There was a hint by 1958 that this future was not materializing.

If we compare the atmosphere of the 1949 competition in Belgium
with another time and place, namely the Cologne 1951 festival of experi-
mental electronic music, similarities as to the promise of the future are
obvious. But here the comparison ends. For electronic music activities
have since proliferated with endowed, even state sponsored centers
of study spread over the world from Japan to South America, and
already new composers and their work are engaging world wide atten-
tion. Nothing to compare with this busy state of affairs has dignified
abstract filmmaking.

Yet the idea of this kind of film art, I must insist, was as broadly
accepted as the idea of a new music. Certainly many who were initially
challenged by the above idea of motion graphics have long since aban-
doned it to indifference or commercial live-action film. Some others
simply did not buy motion graphics in the first place, and they can prac-
tically sing in chorus today, “I told you so!” But these cynical, pessimis-
tic taunters are few in number compared to the other faction - those who
did not make motion graphic films themselves and those who generally
accepted motion graphics as a valid, promising concept.

162 Appendix

As a semi-professional actually trading upon this same beleaguered
idea, 1 was obliged at Knokke to try my best to serve as professional
apologist to explain first, that all is not lost, and next, to attempt to ex-
press a broader viewpoint on this whole subject.

Look back for a moment as I did. Len Lye, McLaren and Fischinger
are perhaps the great innovators and they can each show you films that
represent at least second, possibly third generations beyond their original
inventions in film. A few other filmmakers can show singular successes
which constitute their only sortie into the rarified air of abstract cinema.
Not one individual can be named who has made a successful career for
himself strictly within this specialized field.

It would be difficult to explain why each filmmaker’s effort in a
given technique seems almost to exhaust that technique on his first or
second try. But this characterizes abstract filmmaking from its begin-
nings to the present day. Then also, about every filmmaker since Man
Ray who has had his own modest success, has come by it with a degree
of fortuitousness that is in itself quite disconcerting. Composers today
are busy exploring all avenues of chance in music composition, but this
is no strain and far less disconcerting for the inheritors of a tradition that
is rather overblown with intellectualism and excessive mathematical
orderings. On the other hand it must be slightly unnerving for the film-
maker to discover in a moment of truth that his best audio-visual inter-
relationships have been mostly fortuitous, his most striking graphics,
purely accidental.

The employment of cinemascope plus color in one or two abstract
films in the Belgium competition was effective in generating a lush sen-
suous experience for the eye. One might wish however that something
more satisfying could come from all that rich color imagery. It was as if
each square yard of that huge screen in front of us contained delightful
graphics in motion but all of it was operating at cross pusposes. Or it
was as if we had before us an orchestra on the stage consisting of expert
musicians playing superb musical instruments but that each musician
was determined to negate any purpose of the other. A situation again
which might be of interest to the composer for reasons that transcend
any mere protest reaction against the well-known ensemble achievements
of the modem orchestra. It would be an auditory situation approximating

163

the useful musicological concept of white noise: the full auditory range
sounding at once. Of course this is only an approximation because the
true visual representation of white sound would simply be a white screen.
But the parallel between a stage full of musicians playing at cross pur-
poses and a screen covered with action and texture and rich color is
rather painfully exact. In both cases one soon longs to see (or hear)
something more in terms of form register by way of all this rich sonority
- audio or visual.

These doleful reflections did not add any to my contentment with the
few abstract films I saw in Belgium at the close of 1963. Nor do they
now help me in the task I have undertaken with this writing.

So what is astir to be hopeful about? What argument shall one take
as apologist?

For one thing, isn’t it cozy to have reached bottom from which
famous position there is no other direction but up? I have observed also
that filmmakers do not as a group show any serious tendency to repeat
themselves or anybody else. (Is this a concomitant of the forementioned
tendency to exhaust each new technique after one or two trials?) Or
perhaps the past can be viewed as a kind of catharsis; premature to
be sure, for such a young thing, but nevertheless much needed to clear
the way for: - who knows?

Here I cannot help but add a digression as much as anything to
express my concern with all areas of filmmaking such as we viewed at
Knokke. Perhaps the above “expiatory” viewpoint can be applied point-
edly to the “new American cinema.” Now that such films have been
made once, maybe no one need make another Flaming Creatures or
“Twice a Dog Star Man Triangular.” O.K.; we are purged. And hope-
fully the only way onward is now, somehow, in a new direction.

But these are only negative comments and above all I wish to say
something very positive as to how one may regard matters as they are.

Concurrent with the Experimental Film Competition was a gallery
show of the work of the Group de Recherche d’Art Visuel. The classical
distinctions between painting and sculpture were repeatedly breached in
this show. But of more interest to the filmmaker, were the distinctions
between motion in these works and cinema. Many of their three dimen-
sional productions included integrated light projection systems. With
these they have literally created cinema in an art gallery. Judging the
general reaction to this show I came away with the distinct impression

164 Appendix

that disciplined exploration of the simplest graphic elements in this
modem time is still treated as a kind of exotic new frontier. One only
needed to remember that the entire history of western musical culture is
based upon the simplest principles of permutation to start a chain of
reflections as to why only now at the late time we have begun seriously
to experiment with the possibilities of motion and permutation within
the disciplines of the graphic arts. But the point is, they are begun. And
with this particular group the point of departure is far, far beyond the
previous researches of the Bauhaus and the neo-plasticians.

Also there were concerts of contemporary music and symposia in
which the immediate practicality of the use of the computer for generat-
ing music were discussed. The nonsense bugaboo about the “mechanis-
tic inhumanity” of the “thinking machine” was dispatched readily and
serious discussion that followed appraised favorably the imminence
of applications of computer technology as a new instrumentation at the
service of the composer. Then in Paris and New York I saw more,
pointing to new avenues opening between artist and this fantastic new
instrumentation.

It all relates, and adds up to a view of a world that is rapidly moving
toward the obsolescence of practically the whole technology of motion
picture making, for motion graphics especially. So the abstract film-
maker is destined to become indeed a colossal figmentary anachronism.
Of course he too has existed only to be purged. His visual achievements,
small as they are, may not be forgotten. But his aspiration will one day
soon, it is to be hoped, come to fruition by means of a marvelously more
facile instrumentation linked to the computer and cathode image systems.

Personally, I am optimistically committed to this point of view. I have
employed rather elaborate automated design mechanisms which are
derived from a recent phase in the growth of computer technology. Just
as computer techniques are evolving along a somewhat logical pattern
toward greater refinement, it is my assumption that new graphic as well
as musical possibilities should likewise evolve. At present my equipment
is supplemental to the motion picture camera which now serves only the
recording or memory function. But all my research effort is oriented in
anticipation of a fuller employment of modem computer systems dis-
pensing with the camera altogether.

Future computer systems will certainly transform graphic and musi-
cal instrumentations in ways that are still unimaginable. But among the

ends in view is the capacity to modulate complex design fields in time,
much as musical chords smoothly succeed one another. That this has not
been possible by any trick of camera or animation art will serve to
suggest the plight of abstract cinema till now. Thus it is precisely the
anachronistic quality of the story of abstract film making that should
illustrate best the need as well as the inevitability of future creative
applications of computer technology. Stated bluntly, the abstract cinema
(so-called) awaits the computer to be born.

I have always been disposed to view abstract filmmaking as the
truly unique time art of the dawning age of complex instrumentation
which so threatens and at the same time promises to revolutionize global
social and cultural patterns. This point of view was clarified a little at
the film competition. It takes a hectic and wonderful week in a little
known Belgian seacoast resort, looking at quite an assortment of failures,
to get a bright idea of what new is going on.

166 Appendix

Appendix

Aspen Design Conference 1967

The 17th International Aspen Design Conference was devoted to the theme “Order and Disorder."
John Whitney's comments on this topic give him the chance to discuss the issue of the Random v.v.
the Structured, and how pioneers in the new fields of electronic music and electronic imagery must
deal with them vis a vis the absence of tradition and the presence of “unlimited" possibilities. - W. M.

Let’s consider the use of chance in music composition. Computers can
be used as random number generators, but when you pin somebody
down about this, you find they are not random at all; computers generate
random numbers by some system or another. Get a mathematician to
level with you and randomness begins to look like a theoretical concept
without practical reality. So random and order, chance and disorder be-
come linguistic exercises that fit differently into different disciplines like
one man’s poison.

Looking backward into music history, the part chance played seemed
to hinge on such matters as: “Does the bassoonist have a cold or not?’’
Today we are looking at a rather alarming discontinuity in that history.
For awhile it looked as if the magnetic tape medium was the cause
of all this discontinuity, but now we know it is really the whole thrust of
electric technology, including the computer.

We probably face a vastly altered musical culture of the future. We
seem to be losing traditional concepts left and right, and there is a busy
underground determined to smash any effort to hang onto any vestige of
past traditions. In the face of this, many of the concert public choose to
stay home or else they patronize the traditional concert hall. But my
concern here is with the new composer himself. His predecessors en-
joyed a tradition more readily communicated from generation to genera-
tion than any of the other arts. The teaching of music composition was

167

as thorough as that of mathematics. Now, I think you must agree, there is
that avant-garde, only slightly underground, for whom this whole picture
is quite changed. Without training, spending more time with electronic
devices than with the piano, this composer must be his own teacher. He
must make his own way and hopefully make his own traditions. I will
argue that the magnitude of the transformation of new musical resources
is such that we may perceive a quantum break with traditions more
disrupting than anything that has happened in the arts so far.

I experience an especial empathy with these new composers, also a
personal insight into their disposition, for my work with abstract film has
been out in a limbo, too, where traditions simply are nonexistent. I am
sure we both are dealing with some kind of mixed media we will share
in common somewhere in the future.

It is now known that computer graphic systems are useful in the
creation of a considerable diversity of abstract graphic form. It can be
shown that the precision and detail of the graphics and the power of the
computer to repeat thousands of images, each one with the most subtle
incremental variation, makes for an instrument with superb visual
motion generating capability.

This power of the computer to produce endless variations upon pat-
tern, which stems from the basically mathematical foundation by which
all images are formed, means that we have at hand an instrument for
graphics that is analogous to the variational power of all musical instru-
ments and the mathematical foundations of all musical form. Thus,
computer graphic systems present an opportunity to realize an art of
graphics in motion with potentials as unknown to us, perhaps, as was the
far side of the moon.

The form of such art is unpredictable. While the forms and traditions
of music and the dance may impinge in some way upon a computer art
of motion graphics, this relationship in no way can be made explicit. The
new art calls for a new artist and he cannot be called forth. He must
literally find himself through the success of his own work with computer
graphic systems.

Incidentally, it is not even conclusive that present-day hardware is
adequate to support rapid evolution of new forms. While it is likely that
musical composition with computers will progress coincidentally, it

168 Appendix

may take a generation or two of technological refinement before we may
see significant accomplishments. To date, practically no effort has been
addressed to the design of hardware specifically for the arts of graphics
or music.

But there is too much activity among contemporary artists with
pure light and optical phenomena, and kinetics and light shows and
multimedia experiments, to remain doubtful about the evolution of
comprehensive new art forms with the computer as the classic instrument.

If anyone is repelled at the prospect of the machines taking over in
the situation I have so joyfully tried to describe, notice, if you will, I am
speaking to you from the humanities department, not from a basement
in the science wing. I am speaking of new forms of art of human propor-
tion on a human scale. Your general approval - your acceptance - is
somehow necessary to me. I am interested in an art of design and color,
and a new music. I know, for example, that thanks to new technologies,
the possibilities for the experience of color in some formal context are
greater than they have ever been in the past. That the computer is a new
instrument in this business is no more insidious (I find it less frightful)
than if it were the piano.

In fact, it has seemed to me the threat of the encroachment of
technology, which the computer may symbolize to some, exists only to
the extent that the humanities have failed to keep pace. There is much
more to our problems than that, certainly. But far from repulsion, we
cannot embrace rapidly enough the new culture that includes all electric
technology within its integrity. Of course there should be, and there will
be soon, I suppose, centers devoted to computer arts. And it will be a
less apprehensive state of affairs when partisans for the arts and humani-
ties express the same composure toward this computer world as is now
commonplace in the scientific community.

169

Appendix

John Whitney at Cal Tech 1968

These excerpts from a lecture at California Institute of Technology, March, 1968, are focused some-
what toward the scientific community, attempting to draw the scientist into a vigorous rapport with
the art and technology issue. This appeal for scientists involved in art recalls the quotations from Sir
Kenneth Clark and Dr. Jacob Bronowski in the A.S.I.D. talk reprinted above. - W. M.

As moments of history go, it is well-known that the end of a major war
summons the end of private nightmares and the dawn of a long awaited
new day. So it was for my brother and myself in the mid-forties, except
that our released visions lurched ahead clumsily some twenty years into
the future. The era we supposed was dawning, arrived in fact only now,
more than two decades later.

I swear it is true that as I walked a chilly street in downtown Los
Angeles winter, 1944, 1 was sickened with the conviction that a major
crisis with smog was clearly at hand which would demand immediate
attention from that day onward. With no less anachronistic delusions,
but slightly more cheerily, I expected during the same winter that within
a year or so television technology would burst upon an era of abstract
design and typography, bringing with it unfamiliar delights of music for
the eye to enjoy and a language of information that would mean the
ascendency of a new way with words and ideas that are still not clearly
foreseen nor even describable. Yet to participate in all this my brother and
I were already embarked upon filmmaking careers with abstract films.

Back in those days, my brother and I had no sooner begun to yield to
an excitement for this kind of filmmaking than we realized how deeply
we were to become involved with technology. In an inconspicuous and
not necessarily unique way, this art-technology relationship that we
struggled with predates the proliferation of artists employing industrial

170 Appendix

and scientific technology. Cooperation from industry, especially the
motion picture industry, was very difficult to obtain.

As my own work progressed through the fifties, I came to a kind
of intuition that a mechanical or electrical design instrument was the
missing link in the realization of this abstract art of graphics in motion.

I began to invent design machines. I explored the free swinging Lissajous
pendulum as a pattern-making instrument. And I began to search through
the war surplus junk yards like an archaeologist piecing together complex
machines of some other world, since the dealers had dismantled most
of the complicated World War II machinery simply because it retailed
faster and more profitably in small pieces.

This way I discovered the diverse family of mechanical analogue
computing devices used mostly as antiaircraft weapons fire control sys-
tems. I began to understand vaguely how these systems worked and I
slowly learned how they could be converted into electro-optical graphic
design machines. They were easily converted into machines for dealing
with sine function geometry for example.

It was only with a kind of hindsight, a kind of delayed double take
that I realized I was working with a machine that was really a mechan-
ical model of the modern digital computer graphic systems. But once
having achieved this understanding, my own contemporary perspective
was to follow rather logically from that discovery.

So I could reason quite comfortably that just as the computer holds
such promise in many scientific fields it must also represent the ultimate
weapon - or less dramatically - the ultimate instrumentation for new
dynamic graphic arts as well as music.

Yet the problem might have arisen how could anyone in my position
be able to arrange to use the computer if he was not trained and his
purposes were in no way connected with the scientific or technical fields
normally using the computer systems around the country.

But this problem of qualification did not arise. It did not because
slowly there is emerging out of the sometimes rather lurid flux of
modem arts an art-science interplay. This art-science meeting ground
is not exclusively due to the initiative of artists of course. The scientific
community is ever more prepared to look across compartmentalized
thresholds that once separated the human psyche and the human anat-

171

omy, for example, into isolated domains of art and science respectively.
Furthermore, after C. P. Snow, the chasm between science and the
humanities has been well accounted for in terms of communication or
its absence.

The first generalized broadscale acceptance of ideas recognizing the
relations of art, science and technology in art circles around the world
seems to be occurring right now even though the Constructivist art
movement has represented this viewpoint since the days of the Bauhaus
and before. Perhaps now the cinema-television arts will affect an inte-
gration with their technology. With such integration should come a
clarification of the true thrust and potential of the cinema medium for
communicating message on a hundredfold different levels than has been
known to date.

An unknown world of communication remains to be discovered
within that area of visual experience bounded by color and pattern in
motion and structured in time as in music. Typography, the unspoken
word, can function in new ways within this realm of visual experience.
So can the representational image, often in its broadest symbological,
nonverbal, syntax. Of course, music and sound in general belong here.

Music, often called the one truly universal language and looked
upon, in some special cases, as exemplary of the highest cultural
achievement of Western civilization, stands to be superseded as a
communicating force when new arts of totally intermeshed image and
sound become a part of daily life. Quite naturally then, the technology of
computer graphics demarks the beginning of a new era as surely as we
are witness to the end of an old.

We may look forward to media of communication which are in utero
today but which in the future may actually underpin the very structure
of technological educational media and art if there is to be art.

The first point of consideration in support of this view should be an
examination of the meaning of structure or organization as it is under-
stood in relation to modern concepts of information and knowledge. Pro-
fessor Frederick B. Thompson of the California Institute of Technology
has stated in a recent talk:

“Experience underdetermines theory. Right there is room for those swift strokes of genius that
sketch the underlying structure on which the distillations of our observations find harmony and

172 Appendix

projections beyond our experience find credibility. Data are to the scientist like the colors on the
palette of the painter. It is by the artistry of his theories that we are informed. It is the organization
that is the information."

“The organization is the information,” indeed. I wish to propose that
so far as the educational process is concerned, so far as art is concerned,
we have hardly begun to comprehend the possibilities for meaningful
reordering of information by the graphic image in structured time. We
just do not know what media lie ahead nor what the message capacity
will be. But we may be well-disposed to explore energetically these
possibilities of structure in art and information.

173

Appendix

Interview with John Whitney 1970

This sensitive interview by Film Comment's editor, Austin Larnont, asks some questions you may
have wondered about while reading the main text, and it answers them with more interesting details
about John Whitney's early career. - W. M.

To begin really far back, I had a couple of years at Pomona College, and
at that time was interested in music and thought that I would possibly
become a composer. Simultaneously, I was also intrigued in a technical
way with film and with cameras. I had played with cameras when I was
very young. After two years at Pomona, I went to Europe and spent a
year in Paris. And at that time, two things happened. I was a neighbor of
Rene Leibowitz, who’s a conductor, known for his position with the
French National Symphony Orchestra. But at that time he was best
known as one of the outstanding pupils of Arnold Schoenberg; so he
was writing and teaching Schoenberg music composition techniques. It
was a very new thing, he was really of the radical avant-garde in Paris at
that time, 1939, before the war. I had a very close association with him.

I saw him two or three times a week over a period of several months.
And so, though I had no formal training, I gained quite an extensive
background in serial music composition that long ago. But also, the sec-
ond thing that was happening was that I was there with an 8mm camera
and intrigued with the idea of using it creatively. I had never heard of
this kind of a film. I thought I had invented the concept of an abstract
film. I began playing around with making abstract films. I thought of
them as a kind of visual musical experience. It was only when I returned
to California in the following years that I learned about Oskar Fischinger
and the avant-garde filmmakers of the early twenties in Paris.

174 Appendix

Q: You were in Paris and. . .

Whitney: . . . Knew nothing about any of that. I met Man Ray in Pasadena
after I came back, though he was in Paris when I was there. So really,
when I came back, I began seriously to experiment with little abstract
designs with an 8mm camera, and by about 1940, my brother and I were
working together. Those are still, to my way of thinking, very interesting
little films. They’re hard to show; they’re silent. I was working on file
cards and animating with an airbrush, cutouts, stencils. The first film
consisted of a simple circle and a rectangle. The two were juxtaposed
over each other in a certain way. I cut a stencil that represented the
circle, and another stencil that represented the rectangle, overlapping.
And then I made a stencil of that clean circle, and a stencil of the
rectangle. And then I made a stencil of the negative shape created by the
circle and the rectangle and so on.

Q: Then you airbrushed cards through the stencils.

Whitney : Laying a card against two edges, and laying the stencil against
the same edges, spraying a corner of each card lightly with the air brush,
just start to fill in one little corner on one card. Then I take the stencil
away and replace the card with a fresh one: and this next one will
be filled in this much more, and the third more and more; and in ten
steps, I fill out the shape. Then there was a possibility of using the
negative, so I would put down the negative stencil of that shape and I
would blow just a little bit around one corner and then airbrush all
around, until it completely enveloped that shape. So I had the shape in a
positive form and a negative form, and the motion generated by these
cards was quite a lively motion with a front edge that would fade out
characteristic of air brush. So, just from that simple technique, I had a
whole library of all these different air brush sequences. They added up
to about one hundred fifty to two hundred cards.

And at that point then, I conceived of the idea of using the optical
printer, and having made these cards, I photographed the cards onto
8mm black-and-white film. I built an 8mm optical printer, so that I could
rephotograph those sequences according to a carefully worked out script,

175

introducing color filters into the light source and photographing the se-
quences onto color film. And so I developed the technique that I am still
using here with the optical printer now, with the computer-graphic mate-
rial. [Indicates optical printer nearby.] Here’s a light source, then a mirror
goes here, and the filters rest on top of this condenser lens. Up above I
have a lens tube extension and bellows arrangement, and the lens is
normally at one-to-one; the field travels east and west and it rotates on
its own dead center and another rotational point. It rotates down here, as
well as at this level, so I can locate a rotational center that’s off the
center of the field.

Moreover, the camera goes up or down, so I can enlarge or reduce
the field. Now the first 8mm optical printer had none of these complica-
tions. It was straight one-to-one, and I had no power to reframe the
image. The film was built entirely within a very strict set of limitations.
But completion of the 8mm films was one of the peculiarly rewarding
experiences in making film, because despite the limitations, I had control
of all the possible permutations of that original material, and it was
amazing how many effects could be worked out, how many little varia-
tions could be made. They were quite interesting complex rhythmical
actions all determined by the way these sequences were combined.

The other point is that there’s always more than one superimposure. I’d
back the film up in the camera and then run through a second time with
a second color, some other element, working in a different way. The final
thing is that the filmstrips could be threaded into the projector in such a
way that you could mirror them, turn them over, or you could invert
them. So, you had four different positions for each of the ten shapes.

And there were still some other variations.

It was truly gratifying, and it was stimulating enough so that we went
on and made a 16mm optical printer. My brother and I felt very strongly
that we wanted to be able to compose music as well as the picture. I
invented a pendulum machine for making a variable-area sound track;
and with that my brother and I together made the five abstract film exer-
cises, through about 1944. Those are the films that got many showings.
They won a first prize at the first experimental film competition in
Belgium, and the Museum of Modem Art took prints, and Amos Vogel
started distributing them through Cinema 16

176 Appendix

The Five Abstract Film Exercises takes me up into the late forties;

I had a Guggenheim Fellowship for two years and during that time
developed some spontaneous real-time animation techniques. I could
manipulate paper cutouts to music. I was working with jazz - music that
had no pretensions or none of the complexity and subtlety of structure of
traditional Western music. I was finding ways of generating a visual mo-
tion by ways that avoided the tedium and the restrictions that you get by
any cell animation or any conventional techniques. I was manipulating
cutouts and working with fluids, very much as they are used in the light
shows. I had an oil bath on a level tray with the light below. I put dye
into the oil until it was deep red, and then used red-blind film in the
camera. With my finger or with a stylus, I could draw on this thin bath
of oil; and that would push the oil away and the light would shine
through so I could draw linear sequences very freely; and by selecting
the weight and thickness of the oil, I could control the rate at which the
line would erase itself, so that it was constantly erasing with a constantly
fresh surface to draw on. I was doing that and manipulating paper cut-
outs, and then doing a lot of direct etching on film as McLaren had
done. I made, during that time, half a dozen little films to classic jazz
such as Will Bradley.

Q: You mean , you put the jazz on, and as it was playing you would draw.

Whitney: I would do these things, yes, real time. I was building all of my
own equipment all the time. I had a Selsyn interlock system. The sound-
track would have been previously recorded, and it could be run back-
ward and forward in interlock with the camera. The only cue I had was
what I could hear; so I’d rehearse two or three riffs of a piece, plan it
more or less spontaneously right there and then shoot it, then back the
film up and work on another section or over the same section, a super-
imposure over that, and then shoot it. I’d shoot a whole three-minute film
in one afternoon’s work. Those things were shown around a lot. They
were shown in Belgium at the Universal and International Exhibition of
Brussels in 1958.

Q: Did you run them through the optical printer?

177

Whitney: No, those were all generated in the camera. I was experiment-
ing a lot with contact printing ideas; I would combine positives and
negatives. I would do one sequence and then print it in one color and a
different sequence with entirely different kinds of action and print it
with a second color and possibly a third color. The film, Celery Stalks At
Midnight , was made that way in two or three colors. And another film,
Dizzy Gillespie Hot House , I did that way.

Q: Then did you go hack to working more with an optical printer system?

Whitney: No. That work pointed to a kind of spontaneous performance -
real-time performance. It pointed to something else, to give up film
techniques entirely and to try video techniques. I made a proposal in
the early fifties at UCLA to set up an arrangement with six or eight
video cameras and six or eight performers using these various manipula-
tion techniques, and the cameras were to be mixed electronically - then
you’d perform a real-time graphic experience as an ensemble: and it
seemed to me that it had great validity, and I still think very highly of
that kind of a possibility. I’m surprised that the people working with
the light shows haven’t really ever done anything like this in that way.
Their work is so totally unrehearsed and spontaneous. Even if they do
rehearse - and some of them do - few of them have really thought of a
kind of structuring of graphics. They’re more concerned with a kind of
storytelling, as far as I can see.

A commercial venture could never put up the money to pay a whole
orchestra. But at a school, it could have been set up, and maybe it will be.
A group might work together, and develop the same rehearsed dexterity
and professional skill as an ensemble that you find in music. This goes
on all the time with music groups. They all work together to develop
great sensitivity, and spend a tremendous amount of time rehearsing and
developing interactive responses.

Q: The proposal was turned down?

Whitney: Yes. The video communications department at UCLA, just as it
is at any other university, is oriented toward either educational television

178 Appendix

or training for the television profession, training directors and so on, and
they stay close to the standards. They follow instead of lead.

Q: What did you do then?

Whitney: Well, by that time, the late fifties, I was becoming concerned
with the concept that the whole media of motion pictures was not the
media that I thought it was, that actually what the motion picture camera
would see to record is the thing that’s important. I began to give my
attention to mechanical design machines. It coincided with a growing
skill that I was developing with the technology of the surplus junk yard.

And so, by 1957 or 1958 I was on to these analog computing devices
that were used as antiaircraft gun directors, and aware of the fact that I
was able, for pennies, to buy mechanical equipment that’s unbelievably
costly, and involved fantastic skill in engineering design and production.
And I began to see these things as containing within them, somehow,
the possibilities for a very flexible design tool, which should be the thing
of my interest, instead of trying to improve cameras or develop other
camera techniques. And that led me into developing my animation
machine. The film Catalog was made on it.

Q: It looked like a lot of oscilloscope images very carefully controlled
and moving in a very precise fashion.

Whitney: It actually is doing mechanically what an oscilloscope would
do; and that’s when I began to realize that what I was doing mechan-
ically could be done on the cathode ray tube computer terminal. In about
1966 I made a proposal to IBM, and I began operating under an IBM
research grant. That’s where I am now. But between 1958 and 1966, I
used the mechanical-optical machine primarily to make a living. It be-
came quite successful. I did a number of commercials and feature film
titles, and titles for television shows, using that equipment.

Q: Did you make any of your own films with it?

Whitney: The Museum of Modern Art is distributing Catalog now, but I

179

never thought of it as a film. I didn’t enter it in competitions and never
thought of it as a work of art. It was what it was - a catalogue. I used it
as a sample reel.

Q: How was the film Lapis made?

Whitney: Jim made that, my brother. He continued to make films, he was
not so much hardware-minded as I was, and he worked patiently by
himself. He lived over in the valley out in California. The fact that he
lives in the valley and we live in the Pacific Palisade means we’re in two
different worlds practically. We kept in touch and had quite amiable
contact with each other. And in fact, after I got this cam machine built,
Jim finished a film titled Yantra, by the same technique that we had used
from the very beginning. He much more carefully, much more patiently,
made elaborate cards of hand-drawn dots - thousands of dots - and then
subjected these to optical printing procedures where patterns of dots
were piled upon patterns upon patterns, one level after another, then
solarized all of those sequences, and printed them in different colors.
When he finished Yantra it was shown around extensively. I think it was
finished in the late fifties. Then I had my cam machine operating, and I
helped him construct a similar machine for himself. He started working
on Lapis. The year 1963, when I went to the Belgium experimental film
competition, he finally reached that absolute end point. He was having
such frustrations with his machine. It was getting at him so strongly that
he finally decided that he was not going to go on and work with film at
all. He became interested in ceramics. And so Lapis sat around in cans
for two or three years. Jordan Belson persuaded him to put it together in
its present form. He’s not been making films since then.

Q: Did you do anything between the cam machine and the IBM computer?

Whitney: No, but during that time, actually, my sons and Jackie [his
wife] were beginning to get involved in making films. And when I be-
came a consultant for IBM, that left the cam machine free for them to
work with. Each of them has done things with it. Jackie’s getting more
and more involved. My oldest son John has been making very signifi-

180 Appendix

cant refinements of that machine this year, changing it over - adding
another level that was beyond me, working with servo systems, the
most sophisticated of electrical engineering technology. Servo systems
are not like Selsun systems, they are motors that run according to com-
puterized information that you give them. They’ll run fast or slow and
under absolute control. What’s actually shaping up is the probability that
that machine is going to become a functioning optical system under
computer control. This we’re expecting. We may very well finance this
next year and, if we do, I’ll have a system with almost the same poten-
tials as the programming system that I have with the IBM equipment in
my own machine.

Q: What else are you doing? As if that wasn't enough?

Whitney: Well, that’s about where it is. The thing to emphasize beyond
that is that I think this kind of film is starving for want of much more
creative imagination in the area of formal esthetic creativity.

Q: The hardware is so dominant in the whole process.

Whitney: That’s so. And there are periods all the way along when they
screwed around with all kinds of machines and then finally they learned
to fly, in all that time no real flying was taking place. But we are, I feel,
approaching a time when we’ll have something that flies and with that,
the really important emphasis should fall completely away from the
technology and the hardware and we’ll be face to face with the real
problems. I am quite gratified in these last two years because, in a
way, that’s exactly what I’ve done in my relationship with IBM; I have
not had to worry about hardware there. I have a system here which I
described to you, but it’s an established system; I haven’t had to be
innovating or messing around with inventing new technical problems.
Nor have I with the program that I’ve had. The program that I’ve had
has had a few refinements made during the time I’ve used it, but essen-
tially it’s the same one that I started out with. And so, I’ve really had
three years of the most rewarding creative study. . . and I think that’s
been enormously valuable: I think that I’m getting insights into struc-

tural solutions to learn how to make a graphic experience with some
impact and done with some feeling and not just as a mechanism. I think,
in that sense, Permutations is suggestive and points in that direction.

Q: I think you ve been doing this in the films. You re very strongly taken
and gripped by this thing you re looking at and you don't care how it is
made when you watch it. You just want to watch it.

Whitney: Well, that’s what I hope is the response.

182 Appendix

Appendix

Animation Mechanisms 1971

This article provides the best introduction to some of the hardware/machinery John Whitney has
been using to produce his films. American Cinematographer, Hollywood's professional journal, com-
missioned the article, which was a triumphant breakthrough for an independent filmmaker. - W. M.

The October, 1969 issue of American Cinematographer contained an
article on filming the Star Gate sequences for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Reference was made to my animation mechanisms and I have been
invited to describe these.

As early as 1957 I had begun to construct mechanical drawing ma-
chines, reasoning simply that since the motion picture phenomenon is a
precise incremental stepping process, a drawing tool capable of incre-
mental variation would be useful. It is important to explain that I was
not motivated to create representational images with these machines but,
instead, wanted to create abstract pattern in motion. Since 1940, I had
found myself devoted to the concept of an abstract visual art of motion
structured in time, having for some years reflected over and over again
upon the extraordinary power of music to evoke the most explicit emo-
tions directly by its simple patterned configurations of tones in time and
motion. The tendencies of much art of this century toward abstraction
and kinetics served to reinforce these views during many moments of
serious doubts of the validity of my own concepts.

My first machine, 1957, was immediately put to use in an unexpected
way when Saul Bass included a few short sequences, drawn upon hun-
dreds of animation cells with the machine’s stylus, for the title to Alfred
Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. For one with such visions as mine centered in
the fine arts, (an art so “fine,” incidentally, as to be quite invisible), such

183

applications as titles to a not very significant movie were scant reward.

Also, I soon saw the absurdity of a drawing machine producing
countless animation cells which had to be photographed in turn onto
motion picture film. So my next machine replaced the drawing stylus
with a light which optically exposed the image sequences directly onto
motion picture film by the simple dynamic process of holding the
camera shutter open while the light itself completed one excursion for
each frame.

It soon became clear that there were plentiful absurdities in this
procedure, since, in effect, I found I had labored long and hard only to
produce hardly more than a mechanical equivalent of the cathode ray
tube oscilloscope.

The mechanical motion which first moved the drawing pen over
animation cells and, later, the light to and fro over the objective field of
an ordinary animation stand assembly was merely a set of crank and
lever arrangements similar to the ubiquitous child’s circle pattern drawing
toy or the more elaborate drawing or etching mill used in the bank note
printing industry.

By this time, however, I became aware of two areas of possibility,
the coincidence of which had considerable effect upon the following
developments.

I began to comprehend how camera advance, art work, orbital and
rotational motion, and illumination, could all be knit into a comprehen-
sive automated functioning system. Simultaneously I acquired, (not
exactly overnight) a highly specialized skill in adapting the almost worth-
less mechanical junk excreted from army depots across the country as the
Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines unloaded material on the surplus
market. Junk such as brand new thirty-thousand-dollar antiaircraft
specialized analog ballistic problem-solver computers dating back to
World War II.

My next machine employed hardware from war surplus: Selsyn
motors to interlock camera functions with artwork motions; ball inte-
grators to preset rate programming of some motions; and differential
assemblies to control the incremental advance of the motions as each
frame advanced.

Instead of a point source of light capable of drawing only lines, the

184 Appendix

camera was fixed above a light field about twelve inches wide. Artwork
consisting usually of film negatives of typography or rudimentary
abstract patterns (clear images on an overall black field) could be or-
bited, rotated or moved in a great variety of compound sine function
excursions within the twelve-inch light field.

The camera above was motorized to advance one frame automati-
cally at the instant of the completion of one cycle of the artwork motion.
Driven through a clutch-brake and continuously running motor, camera
advance was made as rapid as practical to minimize that blind segment
of the artwork cycle required for pulldown for the next frame to be
exposed. Thus, throughout the major portion of the artwork excursions
the camera shutter would be in open position.

In order to clarify the simple principles involved here we may take
as an example of sequence from my film Catalog. A film negative
having “1961” (clear type face on a black field) is mounted on the
artwork holder. This artwork is attached so that “1961” is located at
dead center in the camera field when viewed through the rack-over view-
finder of the 35mm Mitchell camera (crank and lever mechanisms had
been replaced by a more elaborate variable amplitude compound cam
assembly by this time).

The art, “1961,” so positioned in center field, can be articulated by
the cam system which, for the moment, is set at “0” amplitude. The light
field below the artwork is turned on, then the entire system is turned
on. Artwork “1961” sits there throughout several complete “0” am-
plitude cycles while the camera advances at the completion of each
cycle, exposing on each frame the image “1961,” immobile at dead cen-
ter field. Now the amplitude controls, through differential gears, begin
a minute orbiting which moves the art on an orbit with an increasing
radius whose center is still camera field center. The simple image,

“1961” now begins to be transformed into a progressively less readable
pattern. The pattern that is produced, moving as it does, smoothly, and
expanding outwardly, will continue to hold visual interest if only as a
simple attractive abstract pattern. (See illustration, Figure A.)

If, instead of a continuously operating filament-type light source, a
strobe light is used, the continuous pattern on the film can be broken into
individual distinct overlaying images such as those illustrated. (Figure B)

I have selected both of these simple actions to suggest some of the
possibilities of which the machine is capable. My film Catalog (see
cover illustration) is a more diverse demonstration of the versatility of
the machine. This film, used as a sample reel, was to be very productive
of commercial assignments in the following years. The titles to the
Chrysler, Bob Hope Television Show and portions of To the Moon and
Beyond of the New York World’s Fair, Alcoa commercials and titles to
the Dinah Shore Show were typical. Of all the productions of this
period, however, the one film which will probably endure was produced
with my second version of this machine and made by my brother James.
The film I refer to is titled Lapis. It has received many awards and
continues to be a very popular film.

The following is a description of the effects seen throughout Lapis.
Most of the patterns are center-oriented, constantly moving dots of color
which continuously reform into new concentric arrays. They were
achieved by a strobed rotary action of the artwork which combined an
orbit, whose diameter was constantly changing, with drifting rotation.
The artwork consisted usually of nothing more than a simple random dot
pattern which was hand drawn.

My brother and I were much intrigued by the results achieved by
these simple random dot inputs. It was astonishing to discover the
variety of orderly patterns generated by as random a source as these dot
patterns. The original artwork contains no hint of the patterns that were
produced. (Figure C)

The above descriptions, however, still represent but the simplest of
countless transformations that can be achieved with essentially the same
mechanical system. For example, the shape of the orbital motion can be
varied into back-and-forth motion on any angular axis with the X and Y
controls of the compound cam assembly. A straight back-and-forth mo-
tion along a line at right angles to a line of type for example produces an
effect such as that illustrated. (Figure D)

Countless further variations can be produced by altering cycle phas-
ing relative to camera advance or exposing only some fraction of each
cycle or by changing the timing of the illumination, its frequency and/or
its on-and-off duration.

These possibilities are greatly expanded by inclusion in this fully

186 Appendix

integrated system of a servo-motorized zoom lens. The zoom cycle is
phased and operated through all or part of its full magnification range in
cycles that coincide with the various excursion cycles of the artwork.

The illustration (Figure E) is from a commercial for a milk product
made in 1964 and was generated from artwork consisting of a careful
hand-rendering of a single droplet of milk. In this case the orbit of the
artwork began with the zoom lens at about midpoint of its magnifica-
tion range. Then the zoom was operated through progressively greater
magnification amplitudes per cycles as the elliptical orbits of the artwork
were modified. The drawing was strobed nine times per cycle, producing
a ring of nine orbiting spheres.

Finally, since my earliest casual interest with motion picture photog-
raphy had been in a college astronomy department, I was familiar with
various applications of optical slit-scanning connected with solar spec-
troscopy. It was, therefore, logical to apply these principles to my motion
picture system. The titles for MGM’s Glass Bottom Boat , and many
other commercial assignments, were done with a slit attached to one
element of the compound cam assembly. The typography was attached
to the other cam. The slit was set to move one full excursion across the
full width of the type, while the type moved north and south one or more
times per half-cycle of the slit. The return phase of the slit-scan cycle

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187

was accomplished while the camera shutter remained advanced, one half
cycle, in closed position. Since there was a preset differential drift of
the north and south movement of the typography the lettering on the
screen appeared to undulate smoothly as if in water. (Figure F)

The combination of this slit-scan technique with zoom produces very
pronounced spatial motion in depth. This is specifically the slit-scan
effect used to produce the Star Gate sequence of Space Odyssey. My
son’s film, By Jina Flores was produced by this slit-scan zoom combina-
tion. The artwork consisted merely of a standard Benday process over-
all dot pattern with a slit-scan and zoom cycle in differentially drifting
interlock. (Figure G)

This existing machine is grossly overdesigned. As a prototype, many
experimental subassemblies have been installed and removed or perma-
nently established over the recent years. In fact, like some machine
tools, each new film assignment involves some hardware assembly or
knockdown. The machine practically fills the room into which it was
built. The machine was featured on a CBS 21st Century Television seg-
ment in 1968. Two overhead wood beams, 4"x 12", span the room and
carry the camera on a transverse dolly hanger assembly whose move-
ment is free and independent of the artwork manipulating mechanism
and illumination table below. This camera hanger assembly permits 360°
continuous rotation of the camera, and back-and-forth straight-line travel
over about twenty-four inches. The assembly connects all the camera’s
electrical leads; selsyn, film advance, zoom functions and phase shift
through slip ring contacts to permit the continuous around-and-around
camera rotation. These camera motions, of course, can be phased and
synchronized precisely with the artwork motions below.

The artwork table below can be rotated 360° as a total unit, but
cannot be operated continuously around because of its electrical connec-
tions. Since some of the cam functions have been covered already I will
skip any further description except to say that at present the machine
possesses four complete cam assemblies, any one of which can be set
up to manipulate artwork or scanning slits or color filter patterns, etc.
These units can be compounded in various ways to produce sum and
difference effects.

It is somewhat idle information to count components but as an index

188 Appendix

of the complexity to which this kind of design system can be extended,
the following statistics are suggestive:

17 Bodine Motors

8 Selsyns

9 differential gear units
5 Ball integrators

This present machine is now serving to test out a vastly simplified
and rationalized system operated by servo drives and controls which,
with a designed interface, will permit direct digital computer control.

The new machine will be marketed under a patent granted in 1963 and
others in development.

In conclusion, may I be permitted a comment from a very special-
ized point of view:

My optimisms are more secure today than in 1940 regarding the
arrival of altogether new forms of art for television and the newer home
library cassette systems. I foresee new forms of abstract design and
typography, which will bring unfamiliar delights of music for the eye to
enjoy and a language of information that would mean the ascendancy of
a new way with words, images and ideas.

Any casual viewer of television throughout the year 1970 may have
noted that graphics, especially typography, have found a new dynamics
that is quite happily suited to the television medium. For example, in 1970,
three major networks sponsored promotional interludes that anyone
with an eye for design could respond to with unreserved pleasure. Yet,
television in the United States, which is sometimes a thing of national
pride, is far too frequently a matter of national disgrace. Aside from
bad taste, bad design, establishmentarianism and commercial impru-
dence, the problems of television still have much to do with a medium
that seeks to find its own “right way to fly.” Traditions, especially
from the theatre, are still a deadweight against flying new video ideas.
My work has always been with new kinds of “flying machines.”

189

Appendix

Computer Art

for the Video Picture Wall 1971

In this address delivered in 1971 to the International Federation of Information Processing Societies,
at L 'jubliana, Yugoslavia (and published that year in Art International ), John Whitney links his
philosophical discussions of music theory to specific examples taken from his computer film
Permutations and Matrix films. Further notes on Matrix are appended. - W.M.

It has already been suggested by Ivan Sutherland that computer graphic
visual displays, like the telescope and microscope beforehand, have
begun to open to our vision a heretofore invisible world. We can say
that the computer has the power to bring about visual enlightenment
with regard to much in the world that was formerly abstruse mathemat-
ical data. For example, periodic phenomena of nature that could be
understood in mathematical terms only, have often failed to have meaning
outside the society of mathematicians and scientists in general till the
present when computer displays are beginning to present new real-time
visualizations of these phenomena.

One domain of periodic phenomena, however, has had its impact
upon our sense of hearing. This domain has been a matter of deep inter-
est and feeling and even considerable understanding to artists. The im-
mediacy of impact upon the audio sense is unequivocal here. The artists
to whom I refer are the musicians and composers of the world’s diverse
musical cultures. And their periodic domain is of course the audio spec-
trum of music with its tones and rhythms, its harmonic interrelationships.

It is interesting to speculate how early in prehistory it was that man
stumbled onto a system of ordering the audio spectrum. Here was a
continuum, a chaos, of infinite frequencies existing between the lowest
tone - roughly 18 or 20 cycles per second - to the highest, say 18,000
Hz. Yet, long before Pythagoras, the simple intervals of the octave, the

190 Appendix

fifth and fourth were extracted and used constructively by musicians and
chanters. Addison in his journal The Spectator, in the year 1711, assigns
to Pythagoras his traditional claim to fame, an anachronism of music
history which was a common error of the 17th and 18th centuries:
Pythagoras, wrote Addison, . . reduced what was before only noise, to
one of the most delightful of all sciences, by marrying it to mathematics;
and by that means caused it to be one of the most abstract and demon-
strative of sciences.”*

We know very little about the music of earlier civilizations (music
was so perishable) but the music of Western European culture since
the 14th century has been held in great esteem, often honored as the
very highest intellectual achievement of Western civilization. And
one further point is that, at least until the beginnings of our present era,
music and science progressed hand in hand, with considerable interest
shared by scientists and artists interchangeably over the mystery of the
mathematical verities underlying the structure of music and their relation
in turn to the rhythms of the cosmos.

In a way all of this has been obscured by modern preoccupations,
and yet the relation between mathematics and music has not been dis-
credited. Although Jean-Philippe Rameau and others did not succeed in
their efforts to discover a comprehensive mathematical foundation for
music, we can state with certainty that there is an implicit and very
complex order of periodic structures behind most of the musical art of
all times.

Let us say it is one of the fortuitous happenings of nature that a
vibrating string of fixed length and tension sounds a characteristic pitch
of tone consistently. But to embellish this tone to aesthetic perfection,
violin makers devoted several centuries of exacting sound box experi-
ment. They were engaged, without ever calling it that, in research upon a
harrowingly complex periodic waveform study designed to satisfy a
particular human sensitivity.

Today the computer offers a means to deal analytically with periodic
phenomena of such subtle complexity, suggesting that we may come to

* Philosophies of Music History, A Study of General Histories of Music 1600-1960, by Warren
Dwight Allen. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1962.

191

an understanding of some of the profusion of quandaries that permeate
musical analysis. John R. Pierce, discussing the computer’s powers to
synthesize music, confirms the complexity of these problems:

We are faced with an intriguing challenge. In principle, the computer can become the universal
musical instrument. All that stands between us and all that was previously unattainable is an
adequate grasp, scientific and intuitional, of the relevant knowledge of psychoacoustics. Both by
experimentation, and by careful measurement and analysis of musical sounds, we must find among
the bewildering complexity of the world of sound what factors, what parameters are important, and
in what degree, in achieving the effects at which we aim: all the variations of sound that we hear
from a skilled instrumentalist, all the characteristic sounds of instruments, the rich massed sound of
the orchestra, and everything that can possibly lie beyond these familiar elements of music.*

But more to the point of this presentation I wish to stress new visual
powers of the computer. Computer graphic displays offer an entirely
unique method of dealing with visual periodic phenomena. The com-
puter can manipulate visual patterns in a way that closely corresponds
with the manner in which musical instrumentation has dealt with the
audio spectrum since the first strings, skins, metal and reeds were used
to make music.

A modern study with computer graphics has begun which is some-
what similar to that Western European period in the development of
musical art and instrumentation. In saying this I am confronted with an
instantaneous assumption by most people that I am comparing the audio
spectrum to the spectrum of light with its colors. No such thing is the
case. The similarity of tones to colors has caught the imagination of
many composers and painters and philosophers since Leonardo. Yet
today we may look upon this viewpoint as being rather too simplistic.
Here is a typical expression of this viewpoint in a quotation from
George Santayana:

There are certain effects of colour which give all men pleasure, and others which jar, almost like a
musical discord. A more general development of this sensibility would make possible a new
abstract art, an art that should deal with colours as music does with sound, o

To come nearer to the truth of this matter one may turn to John Dewey

* Cybernetic Serendipity, The Computer and the Arts, A Studio International Special Issue edited by
Jasia Reichardt. Studio International, London, July, 1968.

o The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana. Published by Modern Library and Collier-MacMillan,

1896.

192 Appendix

for another prediction of a future art that is astonishingly like Santaya-
na’s in some ways but also significantly different:

Today rhythms which physical science celebrates are obvious only to thought, not to perception in
immediate experience. They are presented in symbols which signify nothing in sense-perception.
They make natural rhythms manifest only to those who have undergone long and severe discipline.
Yet a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which holds science and art in kinship. Because of
this kinship, if is possible that there may come a day in which subject matter that now exists only
for laborious reflection . . . will become the substance of. . . (art). . . and thereby be the matter of
enjoyed perception. *

This idea, set down well before computers were born is exactly the point
I wish to make. Let me repeat, the computer graphic display can make
perceptible to the sense that which was heretofore invisible except to the
educated discerning mind. Certain phenomena, especially periodic as-
pects of the world of mathematics, that which has so intrigued the spe-
cialist as to evoke in some trained observers a sense of wonder as with
music itself and often thought of as akin to music can now be made ac-
cessible to direct visual experience.

R. Buckminster Fuller has talked about this matter of direct experi-
ence in another way. He places emphasis upon the function of the artist
to humanize and communicate a modern world vision. He reminds us
that this century’s science and technology have discovered and put to use
practically the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which is still, to the
senses, invisible and quite incomprehensible to the individuals whose
lives are transformed daily by new technology. This makes for a large
part of the chasms of misunderstandings, he says, that characterize the
latter part of the 20th century. Fuller rightfully comprehends the pos-
sibilities for new arts in these freshly discovered domains, and the cul-
tural imperatives of a restoration of kinship between science and art.

Now neither Buckminster Fuller nor John Dewey nor Santayana has
the last word on the overlapping domains of art and science. But their
words tell you much by way of background to the field that I have been
involved with throughout the last five years. I have been using the com-
puter as if it were a new kind of piano. Using the computer to generate
periodic visual action, with a mind to reveal harmonic, juxtaposed
against enharmonic, phenomena. To create tensions and resolutions and

*Art as Experience, by John Dewey. Minton, Balch and Company, New York, 1934.

193

to form rhythmic structures out of ongoing repetitive and serial patterns.
To create ordered variation of changes. To create harmonies in motion
that the eye might perceive and enjoy.

I do not pretend to have advanced far beyond elementary exercises
with the few films I have to show. In fact, as I listen to some of the
earliest known ensemble compositions of anonymous 13th century com-
posers of Europe, I envy their skill and sophistication with their young
art. Yet it is historic fact that the process, underway that long ago, some-
how foretold the achievements of Bach and Mozart. Was it not a kind of
collective learning process? Learning to manipulate and construct such
an enormous variety of periodic phenomena of pitch, rhythm, tonal rela-
tionships and dynamics. At least we do know that learning and invention
progressed hand in hand with the refinement of a great variety of instru-
mentation capable of satisfying the musical discoveries of composers by
providing hardware with which to realize their compositional software.

The marvel of the modern computer need not de-emphasize the
probability that even smaller and more versatile graphic systems lie
ahead. Nor the probability that future generations of artists will know
better how to use these systems.

I have tried thus far to present a different, and I hope unexpected,
introduction to my work in order to stress that it is not a film art like any
of the forms of film art that are established and well-known today. I
could say that what I am doing is more akin to music than to film art,
but that too evokes preconceptions that I wish to avoid. All that my
work has in common with music is, let us say, this patterning of various
periodic phenomena in time.

Further remarks on analog and digital computer graphic systems

Computer graphic instruments are interesting for their possibilities for
generating motion. In fact, there exists a vast unexplored world of
movement and rhythm in abstract space which is now realizable thanks
to this type of hardware. When we examine these images in motion in
their spatial environment we find they can hardly be likened to any pre-
viously known visual experience. This space is unreal space that exists
only by virtue of the motion of the abstract forms that move in it. Forms
can interpenetrate one another. There are none of the limits of mass,

194 Appendix

inertia and gravity such as real bodies in motion encounter. Acceleration
and velocity limitations are the same as with light itself. Color can be
varied as a free continuum of the visible spectrum.

One clue which has the smell of basic principle to it is a promising
outcome of my research study. This clue has to do with periodic visual
structures. By way of comparison, music is unequivocally periodic
phenomena. Music is a continuum of periodic construction in time. I
share a familiar ground with the composer who deals with time as a
major component of his art by composing with periodic units.

Now I have a clue, a hint as to how visual elements can be set in
motion in their own time and space. This clue indicates one thing: to
deal with time as a major component of visual art, we must think quite
differently about graphic form. To construct periodic elements with
visual raw material, an entirely new concept of graphics must be
formulated which places far greater emphasis upon time and motion
than has ever before been assumed.

So far as I know, few have considered graphic art in periodic terms.

Yet all abstract art from Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock and Frank
Stella might be examined for rhythmic components. Rhythm and
dynamic forces exist in static potential; or in a state of frozen equilib-
rium, as Mondrian proposed.

We have a highly developed art of animation already a few genera-
tions old. But here also, no one that I know has ever proposed a theory
of periodic principles, except on the elementary level that the single
frame equals one twenty-fourth part of a second. The animation arts
have not truly invaded the domain of abstract art as have painting and
sculpture.

With the computer as an animation tool, however, its mathematical
determinants have led directly into a new world of integer ratios and
algebraic functions - harmonic phenomena which express themselves
graphically.

First of all, since the computer positions and shapes any graphic
object by x-y coordinates, it becomes the most natural way to position
and move objects by way of some dynamic numerical functions of jc and
v. Immediately harmonic functions come to mind with regard to moving
objects relative to each other. Thinking of graphic form, since it all must

195

be expressed in x-y or polar coordinates anyway, impels one toward
number functions.

It is singularly ironic, to say the least, that most artist experimenters
with computer graphics thus far have sought ways to circumvent the
imposing fact that all their graphic conceptions must be translated into
number functions. After resisting this rather tedious reality for some
time, myself, I have come to welcome the mathematical basis of com-
puter graphics because of the structural advantages I have discovered
thereby. I have come to accept the numerical problems which are natural
procedure with my computerized tool. Now I find that this very acceptance
has opened the door to a new world of visual design in motion whose
true essence is digital periodicity. But for some details that are not im-
portant, this is much the same world that the composer has known for
at least a thousand years: composing audio design periodicity.

Remarks referring to Permutations , an 8-minute film made with the
IBM 2250 Graphic Display Terminal

Now to illustrate, in some detail, what I might call visual harmonics.
These 281 points are moving about the screen according to a set of
instructions in a graphics program which were input to the computer.
Incidentally, it would be difficult to find a better demonstration of the
powers of the computer as an animation tool than this film sequence.
Imagine having to animate by hand 281 points, all moving in precise
orbits at independent rates and directions. The program instructions say,
in effect: Starting at the center of the screen, step to the right a computed
distance and move in an arc around to the left so many computed angu-
lar degrees and place one point. From there, compute a new radius dis-
tance outward and a new theta arc around and place another point. Now
repeat this procedure again and again for a total of 281 points. This takes
about a second or two computation time on the computer to produce
only one frame of this motion picture. Each frame is slightly different
because some of the parameters of the instruction equation are changing
with each new computed picture. As you watch the picture on the screen
here, 24 new pictures a second are displayed and you can see changes
taking place sometimes very rapidly and sometimes quite slowly. This
rate is determined by the size of the incremental steps, or the parametric

196 Appendix

changes, as they are written into the basic equation. Now you will notice
that the points seem to be scattered around in a circular area randomly at
one moment. But at certain moments they all seem to fall in line to make
up some simple rose curve, symmetrical figure; sometimes it is a three-
lobed figure, or ten- or four- or two-lobed figure. These action sequences
proceeding from order to disorder and back to ordered patterning,
suggest a parallel to harmonic phenomena of the musical scale. In an
aesthetic sense, they have the same effect; the tensional effects of con-
sonance and dissonance. The scattered points fall into some ordered
symmetrical figure when all the numerical values of the equation reach
some integer or whole number set of ratios. The effect is to subtly gen-
erate and resolve tension - which is similar to the primary emotional
power of music composition.

A Word About Matrix

Matrix is a short film consisting of horizontal and vertical lines, squares
and cubes. All motion is along a closed invisible pathway (the matrix)
which is a classical Lissajous figure positioned symmetrically within the
motion picture field. The motion of the entire film is simply a sequence
of events of clustering and dispersal of the lines, squares and cubes.

The sonata segments by Padre Antonio Soler were selected to ac-
company this film after the film was nearly in final form. Very little
stretching or shortening of picture or sound was required.

Matrix was made at the California Institute of Technology as one
part of the arts program initiated by the division of Humanities and
Social Sciences with joint IBM sponsorship. The computer program was
created by Dr. Frederick B. Thompson, Professor of Applied Sciences
and Philosophy at Cal Tech. Called REL (Rapidly Extensible Language)
system, this program permits construction of elaborate graphic images
with highly controllable time development through the recursive aspects
of its formulation. An advantage of this program is its interactive con-
venience. Design ideas can be formulated, input into the computer at a
typewriter keyboard and then displayed by a selectable sampling of the
action, all in rather rapid order.

197

Appendix

Cranbrook Essay 1973

This important address delivered to the Computer Arts Society of America at Cranbrook Art
Academy, May, 1973, elaborates the analogy between classical music and various visual phenomena,
natural and cinematic. Here Whitney justifies his rejection of multi-plane simulation of everyday
perception of motion from a fixed-perspective context. He also affirms that the intricacies of musi-
cal dynamics - the legendary defrosted architecture of Baroque music, for example - demand a
wholly new moving visual counterpart so complex that only the new technology will be able to
manipulate it. - W. M.

In a proposal a few years ago, I tried to present a visualization of some
graphic possibilities that might be realized through careful research on
computer graphic instruments. I tried to evoke an image I had myself
seen many years before. The image was difficult to put into words. My
capacities were inadequate to describe the extreme subtleties of a quite
beautiful dynamic phenomenon of nature. I wanted to describe the turbu-
lent activity of minute water particles that anyone can see in the space of
about a cubic foot of densely foggy and quiet nighttime air - assuming
exactly the right lighting conditions. Since these water particles are
much smaller than the average raindrop and are charged electrostatically
in such a way that they do not collide, they flow in casual turbulence
moving freely and smoothly in all directions - upward as often as down
and to left and right. These droplets behave as would a school of min-
nows or bees.

Yet my metaphors profane the elegance and the phenomenal beauty
of the motion I was trying to picture, since bees and fish must propel
themselves. They maneuver about rather awkwardly, whereas these
microspheres of water are almost effortlessly pushed and pulled in
three-space by a fantastic complex of interactive forces of unfathomable
precision and curvilinear hyperdynamism.

198 Appendix

I wanted to say in my paper that this image of motion was the one
experience I knew firsthand with which I could honestly compare my
feelings about many works of polyphony performed, for example, by a
string quartet. Leaving out much else that connotes the power of music,
at least the spatial interweaving of clean, delineated pattern was there
along with forces of orderly interrelationship. Even if you could not
possibly interpret the laws that govern this cloud of simultaneous trajec-
tories, the strongest part of that utterly fascinating experience was its
sophisticated conformity to rule. This fits my ideal of what music should
be like. And in fact dozens of composers over several centuries in
Europe have repeatedly confirmed that ideal.

I was always delighted with that parallel to music. Since here was a
visual motion - of all things - which most vividly evoked the very
qualities one enjoys through hearing music. More or less, that simple
vision has sustained my career for almost thirty years. It has given me
many special insights into film form. It sent me off constructing some
rather unorthodox machines that supplement and systematize the
motion picture photography of abstract motion. And in due time directed
me straight to computer graphic instrumentation armed with convictions
few people comprehend or share. On the other hand, I have not shared
the confusion of many artists who may sense that there must be some
great potential in computer technology, but who falter with their own
definitions of purpose and creativity.

Having completed several computer graphic films, I find it is not diffi-
cult to attempt to sketch some first principles which might help to de-
fine a new visual art. Composers began early on - centuries ago - to
attempt their own enunciation of musical principles. Otherwise our best
composers would not have had the benefit of needed teachers. Most
rules that composers learned in childhood or youth consisted of sets of
prohibitions. Pope Gregory, in the 6th century I believe, established
codices so rich in prohibitions and so strict in orthodoxy (not to demean
the music) that excommunication awaited the nonconformist. Rules that
state what should be done usually lie hidden in the musicians’ own
creative talents, and so only prohibitions surface where they can be ap-
prehended and written down. Excommunication is not a bad punishment
so far as I can see. I would recommend something like that for anyone

199

under my tutelage (if I were a teacher) who commits, for example, my pet
prohibition. A rule that is akin to the largest family of musical rules
governing parallelism in voice-structuring:

It is strictly forbidden to have anything to do with two or more
points having fixed spatial interrelations.

In one overriding sweep, this rule forbids practically the universal
convention of ordinary cell animation, the “pan” of backgrounds. Dis-
ney perfected the “multiplane pan” as a device for refining the illusion
of realism and in so doing strengthened the static fixed interrelation
of his hand-drawn pictures of the “real” world where foreground moves
faster than middle ground, which in turn moves faster than background.
All this is anathema in a conceptual space-time fluid universe where
dynamic interrelations are the only constant; a nonordinary universe
without gravity, scale or particularity, in contradistinction to the real
world of observable Aristotelian fixity. Such a universe, my imagination
could see in those illuminated mists.

The same sweep of my prohibition engulfs the favorite kitbag of a
breed of cineastes whose zooms, pans and trucks, preferably handheld,
have persuaded proponents of the Brakhage School that somehow cam-
era movement and montage allows their camera to look cinematically
into abstraction, beyond the real world in which they and their camera
are fixed quite solidly despite their own frenetic activity. This cinematic
unorthodoxy, ( it has become a video technique as well) in their minds,
instantly transforms an instrument, otherwise known for its recording
and documentation functions, into an instrument for “poetry.”* Perhaps
it may, but is does not open the camera eye to the universe of fluid
dynamics about which I am at pains to define in this essay.

In fact the camera eye, sensitive as it is, must be directed elsewhere
than the “real world,” if indeed it is to be called upon to record a fluid
universe such as my turbulent water particles on a misty night. Were it
possible to intervene in that complex system of nature and direct those
billions of water droplets along their smooth noncolliding, perfectly
curvilinear trajectories, then one might point his camera at them. One
might command, say, four thousand droplets out of the approximate forty

*Annette Michelson, “Camera Lucida, Camera Obscura,” Artforum, v. 9, #5 (Jan. 1973), pp. 30-37.

200 Appendix

>-<

thousand in one cubic foot of fog. Command, upon a given signal from
the cameraman, that these particles form into a perfect circle six inches
in diameter. That happening would be a spectacle indeed.

Short of calling down from the heavens a miracle, there is no other
way to produce a pure geometrical wonder such as a six-inch space
floating ringlet, just happening on cue. If there were a way, it would be
an event several magnitudes superior to the Hollywood or Russian
spectacular. It would require a cast not of thousands but forty thousand,
all participants cooperating in an enterprise bound to put DeMille down
a notch.

And how dare I call a mere ringlet, a natural crown of jewels, called
forth on cue, superior spectacle and greater than dramatized epics say,
exodus of the Jews or the defeat of the Boyards? I derive this conceit
from the argument of Socrates who had noble things to say about the
nobility of geometry as the truest, and consequently the most beautiful.
“They have that purity which makes for truth. They are philosophical.”*
Also I derive this from Mondrian’s dynamic concepts, being a state of
equilibrium: being, not dramatizing the spiritual and universal . 0

Short of seeking in heaven this sort of thing, a way to do it by
machine has been found very recently. A computer can deal with the
coordinate positions of units in the hundreds of thousands. A computer
which can cope with the tax data of a nation surely can cope with the
coordinates of a mere cubic foot of free-floating droplets. It can, but it
barely can. In fact, it can be done only by illusion and fakery such as the
backstage of theatre. The numbers must be trimmed twentyfold or so.
And the rules governing that free motion of particles in space must be
synthesized, because this particular phenomena of nature happens to be
one of the most obscure and quite unsolved problems of modem fluid
mechanics.

Nevertheless the manipulation of particles in space has become the
very foundation of my theoretical, philosophical and practical approach
to computer art. Particles take on classifications as fields, conglomerates,
clusters and transformational entities. Dynamically they generate and

*Plato. Philehus, 51 c.

oPiet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, New York, 1945.

201

release tension by periodic, harmonic structuring, akin to music; they
generate, transform and dissolve matter according to Hoyle (the as-
tronomer) * The transformational attribute is in accord with much more
than Hoyle, since the arrangement of many points by either density or
intensity constitutes the basis for both the television-scan and the
photo-printing processes. If an array of points can be caused to arrange
themselves into the aforementioned magical, geometrically beauteous
ringlet, they can at another time, and with some more sophisticated con-
trols, be caused to transform and group themselves into any image a
camera can photograph. Thus, if we gain mastery over the manipulation
of a plurality of points it follows that we may rule the universe of visual
display, that is to say, a universe which then becomes an ethereal con-
tinuum from pure geometry to pure representation of nature. Such is the
power usually possessed by rulers of universes. That is not likely ever to
be my power; but the history to date of slow progress in that direction is
as follows.

My brother made Yantra in the fifties. This film was the fruition of at
least fifteen years of work, during which we both had made films by a
succession of principles, each one momentarily considered by hypothesis
to be the basic unit, the least common denominator, the atom, or the
simple building block for an art of abstract film. Jim had found in Fred
Hoyle’s hydrogen dynamic theories about the formation and transfor-
mation of matter in the universe, a poetic metaphor in harmony with
Vedantic Cosmologies 0 and, happily, applicable to our film researches.
He started drawing dots by the tens of thousands.

I, sharing his conviction, started looking for machinery, as is my
personal disposition, to do so by a “better” method. The better method
that resulted was an elaborate piece of machinery used by Jim to make
Lapis which was a further exploration of dot-generated pattern that won
prizes in the early sixties and continues to be a very popular film - by the
standards of this kind of personal film - and a durable work of art.

There were many reasons to support our faith that we had concep-
tualized a root principle. However, anticipation that computer graphic

*Fred Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy, New York, 1955.

°Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and Civilization, New York, 1963.

202 Appendix

systems should one day dovetail with this principle exactly was not part
of our reasoning; nor could it have been. But the idea of a point which,
treated dynamically, produces a line which in turn produces a surface
which generates a solid is an idea to be found in Paul Klee’s A Pedagog-
ical Sketch Book. It does truly anticipate computer graphic displays of
the present-day vector scan principle to the extent that a dynamic point
of light on the cathode screen is used to draw lines while close-packed
lines generate surface.*

Our search throughout the years since 1940 may be characterized as
a quest to revolutionize the visual artist’s concepts of dynamism. If
art in this century reveals a trend toward the evocation of the image of
dynamism as exemplified by such movements as the Futurists, then we
searched for a genuine art of movement. We were impressed by the
number and frequency of traps and pitfalls by which, due to con-
ventional thinking and graphic tradition, one’s best dynamic aspirations
fell short, frozen and static in terms of film dynamics. The tradition of
fluid dynamic time, which is second nature to the music composer, finds
almost a mirrored reverse polarity within the tradition of the visual art-
ist. Time and space, the talisman of this century for both the arts and the
sciences, have actually received less than lip service from the plastic
artist. Film art, the child of this century, we came to believe, and we still
do, conceptualizes time and space with childlike awkwardness if at all.

As a revelation, one need only sit at the piano and pick through any
lento movement from a Mozart keyboard work, taking note of the timing
markings and their effect, in order to realize the staggering grasp of
temporal manipulation involved in musical composition. This disclosure,
compared directly to cinema, induces one instantly to reflect that we
have not even begun to understand metrical or rhythmic organizations of
time in cinematic terms.

Critics of conventional cinema often praise film editing, etc. by ap-
plying musical superlatives. These critics I suggest might go back to the
keyboard and ask themselves once again: is it really so? An argument
can develop to the effect that modem musical conventions have almost
abandoned metrical structure, to which the immediate response is that

*Ivan E. Sutherland, “Computer Displays," Scientific American, v. 222, #12 (June, 1970), pp. 56-60.

203

music of this century is hyperreactive to its own enormously successful
past tradition. And, besides, popular music is still rigidly conventional
and metrical. Then comes the clincher: is not cinema presumed to be a
popular art? Conventional cinema is hardly the best proving ground for a
musical avant-garde.

In more ways than one, the plastic artists, as well as their brothers in
the musical avant-garde, conduct a rearguard struggle against their own
traditions (sometimes even last year’s tradition) with more vigor than
they assault the “avant” itself; which points up the confusions surround-
ing the whole concept of the tradition of the new.* For myself, strangely,
I have felt a certain placid aloofness to the issue of avant-gardism, being
engaged in an effort to establish some tradition where none has ever
existed before. My brother and I were told at an impressionable age by
no less an authority, in our minds, than Tony Smith, that we were more
or less “over-the-hill” into the culture of the 21st century (ironically for
us as far as recognition in our time was concerned). We needn’t concern
ourselves manning cultural barricades, he advised, and we listened.

Much as I admire Schoenberg’s gigantic transformation of the prevailing
concepts of metrical structure, I felt not the slightest need to follow in
his footsteps, as most composers have since. Instead I consider it quite
the most urgent challenge of my film art to clarify the myriad difficulties
that surround rhythmical structuring of visual patterns of motion.

Any sensitive analysis of music shows that it is patterned motion that
evokes emotion which is the content of music. Form and content happen
to be two terms. What they denote in music is merely one thing, just as
time and motion are attributes of one event.

So it is with music. The overriding question remains undetermined,
or underdetermined: (Here is a just evaluation of my films, I believe.
They supply an affirmative answer to the question, but still the affirma-
tion is underdetermined.) The question is: can motion, of a kind of ab-
stract neoplasticism bear the burden of content in a visual cinema as it
most obviously does in the realm of musical experience? The affirmative
response to this question is, of course, the premise of my entire career.

I will try to outline my theoretical understanding of this subject in

*Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, 1968.

204 Appendix

the following paragraphs which are still laced with analogies to
music which, I am aware, render as much weakness to my argument as
strength. There are pitfalls to speculative discussion of this sort which
attempts to speak about one art in terms of another. It draws the two
together in ways, I am sure, which will one day seem outrageous.

The content that we hear in music proceeds from the temporal ar-
chitecture of pattern configurations which occupy a spatiotemporal envi-
ronment whose dimensions are frequency, intensity and density. The key
word, architecture, so readily befits the meaning of structure in music
that it becomes a facile transfer device to shift one’s thinking from the
aural to visual. But wait. Do not flip, toggle-wise, from Cathedrale
Engloutir to Notre Dame de Chartres - from the black key arpeggios of
Claude Debussy’s little tone poem to the still outlines of a cathedral
situated a short distance west of Paris. Instead of transferring the mind
from the ethereal fluidity of Debussy (he will have to do since I’m stuck
with this metaphor) shift only the shorter distance from Debussy to my
misty globules tumbling elegantly in space. In fact, if we could only
color those crystal orbs in pastels, then Debussy, and the mists would be
a look-alike. But I digress.

If we can hold onto this transfer metaphor, then we must reflect.
Reflect that this temporal architecture, these musical configurations start
and stop, rise and fall, accelerate and slow to cesura. In the process there
is an accumulation and discharge, renewal, gathering and release of
tension. Layer upon layer of dynamic forces, all essentially rhythmic,
harmonic and periodic, all contribute to subtle, sometimes tremendous,
accumulations of tensional energy force.

How can music do this to us? To quote Claude Levi-Strauss:

music . . immobilizes the time which is passing so that when we

listen to it we accede to a sort of immortality.”* Is this a clue? Now shift
thinking from aural to visual. Is it not possible that I may succeed to
hold your attention with fluid visual structures of periodic and rhythmic
order to achieve the same accumulative effect? Visually to exercise the
same power that the composer has to “immobilize time which is pas-
sing?” Here is another quotation: “Music is temporal in the more exact

: Octavio Paz, Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction, Ithaca, 1970, p. 61.

sense that, for its ends, music enlists time as force.” And one more:
“Music is temporal art in the special sense that in it time reveals itself to
experience.”*

Now the power that music holds over us is not so simplistic nor
trivial that it can be explained in a few quotations or a few paragraphs or
for that matter, even a few books. All in all, I have only touched upon
some aspects of the temporal and motion attributes of music and found
them paralleling visual properties of my own computer explorations.

That is perhaps all that I can do at this time and in this situation.

The question asked a few paragraphs above, of course, can only be
resolved in fact when motion within a visual framework does demon-
strate that mystical power to extract content from time itself. I can dem-
onstrate that by computer we can manipulate visual motion with a fluid-
ity that rivals those miraculous mists. We can share with music, visually,
her own exclusive environment of frequency, intensity and density . 0

It can be said about music, in a special sense, that it does not exist at
all - it only happens. In just ten years now the visual artist has acquired
access to a similar domain wherein visual events can “happen” without
prior or subsequent existence. This is, in its own way, Bucky Fuller’s
knot: “patterned integrity” D which he ties in thin air. Thus we have at
hand an art of spatiotemporal architectonics that lies outside the tra-
ditions of the visual arts, or poetry, drama, dance, music - or cinema.

* Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, New York, 1956, p.2()0.

oB. Henisz-Dostert, Rel - An Information System for a Dynamic Environment, Pasadena, 1971.
□ Hugh Kenner, Bucky, New York, 1973, p. 23.

206 Appendix

Appendix

Democratizing the

Audio-Visual Arts 1974

In these program notes for the U.S.A. International Animation Festival, New York, January, 1974,
John Whitney introduces the videodisc into his theoretical backpack, hailing it as the particular
instrument through which visual music may be perfected and distributed. - W. M.

Peter Goldmark contributed to contemporary speculations the intriguing
idea that a video-storage home library would serve to decentralize and
democratize the U.S. television landscape which is culturally deprived
because of commercial obligations to the mass marketplace. Certainly
since his remarks, if not before, all home video marketing projections
have been conceived as a kind of enterprise resembling book or record
publishing. However, your local home video record store at the outset
will be stocked with very little to compare in value even with median
quality literature or music.

It should be more obvious than it is that a durable art, worthy of that
classification, worthy of buying for the home and presumably for view-
ing over and over, will be in short supply. While it is true that a phono-
graph album of Beethoven Quartets is not quite a household common-
place, classical records do sell in large numbers. Classical European
music and music of other cultures and epochs appeal in such a way as to
encourage occasional or frequent replay. It would seem - and this point
is most frequently overlooked - that the kind of appeal which encour-
ages replay is the strongest inducement to sell any disk into the home.
Music is loved, hence, it sells, because of that appeal. The great wonder
of this is repeatability. Music has it. Jokes do not. Few movies do. What
TV shows do? Count them on your fingers. There is only an obtuse
relationship between “classic” and repeatability. Still the very word

“classic” is a common label for that which has withstood the test of time;
i.e. repeatability. The greatest wonder of all is Muzak: the repetition of
the familiar gone to seed. There’s repeatability for you! Match if you
can this daily sustenance we derive from music, good or bad, against any
other art.

As soon as the record industry came into being, there was at hand
and available for the taking, ready-made, an enormous backlog of music
- some six or eight centuries worth. And there was a diverse market of
tastes for the product. The point is that most extant television or cinema
is patently not so designed nor does it merit repetition. Thus, there is
scarcely a “backlog” for the videodisc publisher to draw upon, corpo-
rate investors optimism on this point notwithstanding.

It is wrong to believe that an industry very well capable of producing
such an invention as the new videodisc mechanism is in any way by
itself equal to the task of producing a culturally valid, audio-equal-to-
visual library which can compare with our global musical inheritance.
That musical tradition is quite literally an accrual which derives from
generations of extraordinary individual and collective invention.

It would be encouraging to think that an entirely new cultural tradi-
tion, an art created fresh for the videodisc, might spring forth in the
next ten years. Considering the fantastic interest and random turmoil in
student filmmaking and computer graphics and computer music, which I
have seen throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe, something
like a renascence may be brewing in what appears to be the present
so-called underground counter culture. If some sort of renascent culture
is in the making, the universities should and will play a role in permit-
ting this to happen. The computer is the most significant instrumentation
involved, and at present it is accessible generally only at universities.

Computer technology possesses the most exciting possibilities yet to
utilize the fantastic potential of video color phosphores. A point that is
frequently overlooked is that the home color video system is potentially
the greatest color invention of all time, far surpassing any application of
pigments or dyes. What a “bright future” indeed, if we can conceive an
art of spatio-temporal architectonics, a color, motion, visual double to
music, emerging at this most propitious moment for the videodisc; a
videodisc with eye-and-ear-gratifying repeatability.

208 Appendix

Industries, especially those which have profited most by a kind of
mining (as well as frequent pollution) of our cultural resources, might do
well to acknowledge their responsibility to sponsor research directed at
creating a new body of knowledge to bring about a fresh color-motion-
sound art for the videodisc.

One might observe that university and industry alike have their role
to play in the contemporary cultural environment and note, too, it is an
environment which is perennially threatened by the Muzaks of commer-
cial pollution. Both institutions may find self-interest served in assuming
responsibility toward reordering this condition of modem life no less
than reordering the world around physical environment.

There is at present more sponsored research at experimental video-
centers around the world. So one must spell out the distinction between
video and computer. Computer technology and video have existed as
separate hardware domains, but as raster-scan techniques are being
applied more and more to computer displays, the fields are merging.
Nevertheless, the fundamental design problem of a new visual double to
music is to deal with graphic structure on a deep level as with the pat-
terned structure of music. Video techniques cannot cope with these
problems; only computer software does. Video synthesizers fail at the
point where the computer-generated image begins; where pattern is the
true product of deep structure, not a mere video analog frequency
permutation.

There is a great need for exploratory study of motion-design struc-
ture at the computer level, a need to reset priorities which are at present
inverted. Video control of transformations and color is already being
explored and will provide orchestration in the form of color and textural
enrichment to basic design when it flows innately from deep structure.

To summarize: the videodisc is the most likely among the contenders
for the home aural-visual record library. Aside from its value as a
reference source, this library will be stocked with a world of pleasures
that will command our responses again and again - else who needs a
library? Today, music is our only model for this kind of enjoyment.
Examine in depth the properties of music; then an alert observer in these
times will discover that audio and visual outputs of the computer are the
key to that garden of future delights.

209

Appendix

Computational Periodics 1975

John Whitney coined the term “computational periodics" in response to a questionnaire Ruth
Leavitt circulated in preparing her anthology Artist and Computer. He felt it was too pompous or
unwieldy right from the start, but it was the best name available at that time. The crisp statement is
still interesting to see the alternate versions and steps one takes on the way to a better solution. -W.M.

We may assume that a time will come when that which I am about to
describe will name itself, but for now: ‘computational periodics’ is a
propositional and tentative term which may help to designate a new
unified field for a heterodimensional art, a field whose special dimen-
sion is time, and thus an art that is temporal like music, but further,
spatio-temporal, an art whose time has come because of computer
technology and an art which could not exist before the computer. Even
though this art will be found in the notebooks of Leonardo and has been
in the collective imagination, like the flying machine, since his epoch it
was a technological impossibility until the development of computer
graphics.

Rhythm, meter, frequency, tonality and intensity are the periodic
parameters of music. There is a similar group of parameters that set forth
a picture domain as valid and fertile as the counterpoised domain of
sound. This visual domain is defined by parameters which are also
periodic. ‘Computational periodics’ then is a new term which is needed
to identify and distinguish this multidimensional art for eye and ear that
resides exclusively within computer technology. For notwithstanding
man’s historic efforts to bridge the two worlds of music and art through
dance and theatre, the computer is his first instrument that can integrate
and manipulate image and sound in a way that is as valid for visual, as it
is for aural, perception.

210 Appendix

That rare talent of the composer to create music which is self sus-
taining, i.e., the power of music to capture and hold our attention, is a
sophisticated and subtle art which has been the exclusive gift of only a
few composers in each of many past generations. It was a pedagogic
skill, however, that a pupil might learn, provided he was himself pos-
sessed with latent genius. In this century all that pedagogy has been
reduced to anxious uncertainty. The harmonic and metric traditions, for
one thing, seem to be untranslatable into the new periodic resources that
abound in computer technology. The body of knowledge that resulted, by
the nineteenth century, in musical works of ponderous scale and propor-
tion, is a lost art. By the standards of the Baroque era the present has
retrogressed to infantilism.

The new composer, and the visual artist who may aspire to deal with
teleonomic structures, could as well be the child of some early dark age.
The Twentieth Century began with technology and has reaped a whirl-
wind of cultural dislocations and amnesia. Materials and forms and
attitudes are so altered that past traditions are generally moribund.

Also from the point of view that this Century is but an episode in the
life of human culture, it is clear that more paraphernalia of this epoch
may be cast off than will survive into the next. Yet surely the computer
will not. A solid state image storage system will replace the silver chem-
ical ribbon and cinema will eventually be interred in the archival museum.
But computer and computer graphics bring to mind the kind of tools that
may characterize an age succeeding this century’s age of the machine.

The computer is the coequal of the entire repertoire of musical
instrumentation and heir to that domain of musical sound. At the same
time, the computer is the ultimate kinetic image generative instrument.
The kinetic image is in truth the creation of computer graphics since the
cine or television is but a recording device and the hand-drawn image of
motion is but a cartoon of motion.

Tatlin, Rodchenko, Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, Fontana, Duchamp, Kan-
dinsky, Mondrian, Pollock and twice that many more artists of this cen-
tury testify to the drive toward dynamic organization of energy and force
in art, and toward ephemeralization of the art object in painting and
sculpture. The past decade has seen that direction lead many artists to
cinema, exotic technology and experiments with cybernetics. Yet it has

passed generally unnoticed that this preoccupation of the last one
hundred years has been toward a musicalization of visual art. For the
urge to produce abstract architectonic structures that possess fluid trans-
formability in visual space is no less than a grand aspiration toward
music’s double in the visible world. It is as a preoccupation with art in
this exclusive sense that we may use the term computational periodics.

212 Appendix

Appendix

Digital Pyrotechnics 1977

This, the final form of an article that had appeared in Interface and Beyond Baroque magazines,
was delivered at the First Computer Faire and published in their proceedings, 1977. Here John
Whitney formulates and illustrates his full-blown theory of visual harmonies. - W. M.

Abstract:

Harmonic forces give shape to our experience of past and future. This is the dramatic essence of
musical experience. It is why the composer, more or less intuitively, has manipulated the network of
harmonic relationships of all musical scales for as long as music itself has existed. Evidence is
accumulating to substantiate the need for much further study of harmonic phenomena. Because
there is reason to believe - as I do - that the tensional charge and discharge - the expectations
evoked and thence fulfilled by tonic structures in music - is a direct product of the mathematics of
harmonic order. I further believe that the same possibilities exist in the skillful design of harmonic
pattern for visual perception. Therefore, I am exploring harmonics designed for eye instead of ear. It
is interesting to note that the very creation of harmonic pattern had been altogether inconceivable
until a very recent time when computer graphics eventually and slowly became available to the
visual artist.

I’d like to show how well computer graphics and harmonic pattern are
suited for each other. And show how useful this compatibility can be for
employing the computer to charm the eye.

To begin, let’s consider that manner by which composers for cen-
turies have used harmonic “force” to attract and hold the attention and
otherwise charm the ear. Then we will examine a similar form of visual
“force” which has been made possible by computer graphics.

At the outset we know the musician’s aural spectrum to be an undif-
ferentiated and continuous spread of frequencies, say from twenty to
twenty thousand cycles. Yet this apparently homogeneous continuum is
not continuous at all. Harmonic relationships interactively transfigure
this spectrum. Harmonic phenomena create discontinuities, as nodules of
tension, anticipation, and resolution deform this otherwise smooth con-
tinuum. Whole number, or harmonic nodes, scattered throughout the

213

spectrum create order/disorder proclivities: centers of emotional focus
which distort an otherwise smoothly ascending texture. In fact, sounding
tones over the span of just one octave persuades the ear that we are
nearer a return back to the start than we are advanced along any straight
line of upward continuous ascension.

I want to suggest that it is this particular discontinuity, not really any
other quality of the audio spectrum, that constitutes the raw material of
the composer’s art. Not pitch, texture, rhythm, and meter. Not frequency,
intensity, and density, as most 20th-century modernists have us believe.

That is to say, no matter how we divide the spectrum into steps we
find a hierarchy of perceptual values that distinctly rank each step. It is
the composer’s cunning, or intuition, or even mindless exploitation of
this hierarchy that is the primary source of rhythmic vitality and emo-
tional content of music. The composer, however, must cooperate with
these natural harmonic forces, or see his strategies defused by them. He
cannot work his will against, nor exercise insensitivity to the charge and
discharge. He cannot escape the dominion of the gravitational force of
harmonic moment.

Furthermore, as a corollary to all the above, a visual domain of har-
monic consequence has become accessible through computer graphics.
With the graphical display rooted upon coordinate mathematics it is only
natural that a great variety of periodic interference patterns can be pro-
duced. The motive now exists for the artist composer to discover his
way into this diverse domain of dynamic visual form structured out of
two-and three-dimensional harmonic periodicity. This domain abounds
with tonic centers of focus as in music. And this domain will render up
an equivalent rhythmic and emotional content as in music. I think we
will soon see the artist learn to cooperate anew with natural harmonic
forces in hitherto unexplored visual territory.

In truth, harmonic forces give shape to past and future. Yet harmonic
force is not all that mysterious. We can speculate why the sound of “ti”
urges us on to “do.” Significantly a good diagram for the perceptual
dynamics is found. (See pp. 70-71 and the flipbook.)

It is characteristic of harmonic phenomena, visual, aural, or otherwise,
to show this kind of pattern. As patterns go, the illustration is perhaps
explicit in a way that is even more obvious than the aural, leading-tone

214 Appendix

effect of “ti” upon “do.”

Eye and ear, each in its own unique manner, experiences the
dynamics of this kind of pattern as an event in time - as punctuation.
Especially as an event of arrival or departure. When we arrive at “do,”
the octave above the tonic “do,” we hear that rudimentary relationship
with a particular infallibility. If we sample ascending steps of the scale,
the ear is bound to sense the final event of arrival just as the eye can see
arrival and departure relationships in the illustration. I might add that
these relationships are many times more explicit when seen as a motion
picture sequence.

In terms of visual perception, vaguely a corollary to aural responses,
we have here a phenomena of hierarchical distribution and classification
of elements into an array in which all are ranked according to some
perceptual scale of complexity.

No need to argue which pattern is more “consonant” than another,
for generating dynamic patterns here is an order/disorder principle, or a
consonant/dissonant principle, to work with. It is a principle which can
be exploited in more ways than one might expect to give meaningful
order to temporal development. The principle becomes a composer’s
valid strategy - probably the first strategy to be so defined and applied in
the brief history of the art of the computer graphics.

Finally, it is worth remarking that the illustration for this article
could not be created by a conventional hand-drawing technique - at least
that would be quite difficult. Moreover, it would be impossible to hand-
animate the film from which the illustration was derived. Many of these
films required thousands of drawings while the computation for plotting
is staggering. Thus the computer is the ultimate and the only tool for
visualizing the dynamic world of harmonic functions. This may serve to
illustrate the point that this new world of visual art cannot be confused
with any previous traditional forms. (See Art International , Vol. XV/7,
September 20, 1971, or reprint on pp. 190-97, appendix.)

It should be of particular interest to realize that computer graphics,
this 15-year-old infant, is patently capable of bringing forth a totally
different kind of visual experience as unique and riotously enjoyable as
the Chinese, pre-Christian invention of fireworks.

Appendix

Film Music 1977

Roy Prendergast's interview with John Whitney for his book Film Music juxtaposes the improvisa-
tional style of the early oil-wipe films with the issue of control and balance in the mature computer
film Permutations. Thus he brings us ideologically full circle: the intuitive, handmade film de-
pending on “inspiration” is replaced by a conscious, instrumented film depending on sensitive,
disciplined manipulation of natural harmonic laws. - W. M.

Work with animated sound has not been carried significantly further (if
that is indeed possible) in recent years and one finds filmmakers like
John Whitney going back to traditional music or onward into computer
technology. Whitney’s film Matrix , for instance, uses some of the piano
music of Antonio Soler. Whitney has, however, carried forward his con-
cepts concerning similarities between the visual and aural arts. “At the
outset the similarities obtain only a visual world that is completely
dynamic,’’ he emphasizes.

During the late 1940s Whitney was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship for two years. “During that time, [I] developed some spontaneous
real-time animation techniques. I could manipulate paper cutouts to
music. I was working with jazz - music that had no pretentions and none
of the complexity and subtlety of structure of traditional Western art
music. I was finding ways to satisfy my own concepts regarding the
dynamics of visual motion by ways that avoided the tedium, stasis, and
the restrictions that you have with any cell animation or any conven-
tional techniques. I was manipulating cutouts and working with fluids,
very much as they were later to be used in the light shows. I had an
oil bath on a level tray with the light below. I put dye into the oil until
it was deep red, and then used red-blind film in the camera. With my
finger or with a stylus, I could draw on this thin surface of oil; drawing

216 Appendix

would push the oil away and the light would shine through so I could
draw calligraphic, linear sequences very freely; and by selecting the
weight and thickness of the oil, I could control the rate at which the line
would erase itself, so that it was constantly erasing with a constantly
fresh surface to draw on — the ultimate tabula rasa. I was doing that
and manipulating paper cutouts, and then doing a lot of direct etching
on film as McLaren had done. I made, during that time, half a dozen
little films to classic jazz recordings such as Will Bradley's.

“At that time I was building much of my own equipment including a
selsyn interlock system. The sound track was previously recorded, and it
could be run backward and forward in interlock with the camera. The
only cue I had as to my progress in making a film was what I could hear
along the soundtrack; so I would rehearse two or three riffs of a piece,
plan it more or less spontaneously right there and then shoot it; then
back the film up to work another section or over the same section, or
make a superimposure over that. Accumulatively, I was painting a com-
plex moving image on film. I’d shoot complete three-minute films in one
afternoon’s work.”

The important thing about Whitney’s work in this area was that it
pointed to a kind of spontaneous performance - much like improvisation
in music. Whitney points out that this system “pointed to something
else: to give up film techniques entirely and begin to explore video tech-
niques. I made a proposal in the early fifties at UCLA that we set up an
arrangement with six or eight video cameras and six or eight performers
using these various manipulation techniques - the cameras were to be
mixed electronically - then we’d perform a real-time graphic experience
as an ensemble. The very idea of an ensemble to ‘perform’ a visual art is
quite valid. I think and hope it will happen some day.”

In a film entitled Permutations , Whitney has consciously carried
the consonance-dissonance (relaxation-tension) concept of music into
the visual arts through the imaginative use of computers. Speaking
of the dots that create the graphics of the film, Whitney points up the
similarities of the effect, created by the graphic figures, to some of the
tensional effects created by music. Whitney says: “Every one of the
points in Permutations is moving at a different rate and moving in an
independent direction in accord with natural laws as valid as Pythagoras’s

while moving within their circular field. Their action produces a phe-
nomenon which is more or less equivalent to musical harmonics. When
the dots reach certain numerical (harmonic) relationships with other
parameters in the equation, they form elementary many-lobed figures.
Then they go off into a nonsimple numerical relationship and appear
to be random again. I think of this as an order-disorder phenomenon
that suggests the harmony-dissonance effect of music. Graphically, as a
static illustration in a book, it may not be as striking as it is to perceive
the dynamics of the experience on film.”

Whitney does, however, see the inherent fallacy of trying to invent a
technology that would produce a musical counterpart to graphics or vice
versa. For him, “music is sort of a narrow road I’d like to try to steer my
own way through. I don’t want to go in either of two directions. For
example, I don’t want to be mechanistic about art. And yet I’d like to
begin to work with parallels which abound within the computer system
for sound and image. Let me add, I am not composing music right now
simply because I have my hands full with what I’m doing about the
graphic formal problems.”

Whitney rightly observes that creating some sort of musical score
that would simultaneously generate a graphic countervoice would be
“just as arbitrary to do as to invent a machine whereby I might com-
pose the piano part while the machine does the violin part of a duo
musical work. Yet all in all the great music of the future may well be
heterosensuous.”

In his more recent films Whitney has been trying to achieve the same
kind of control that the composer has with music. I see the composer as
an intuitive architect creating and manipulating aural material which has
the effect of producing distinct feeling states on the listener. However,
Whitney “agrees with Stravinsky that the problem of music is essen-
tially one of architecture. A kind of spatial architecture. The emotional
response is solely a by-product or a natural, inevitable development
from that.”

Whitney draws this concept into his film work, believing that “it is
possible to create a spatial architecture that the eye can perceive and that
has the same kind of potential for emotive consequences as the most
profound music.”

218 Appendix

Whitney also feels that he is gaining more and more control over the
effects he wishes to create. He says: “I do have a cautious, unfolding
confidence in being able to predict effects that I know will affect you.
But one technical development that is urgently necessary is production
in real time. I think as soon as we have computer graphic systems that
produce the kind of fluidity I’m presently able to generate, being gener-
ated in real time, then we’re going to be able to achieve something
fantastic Then we’re going to really begin to make exciting film ex-

periences. And I’m sure these developments will have revolutionary
consequences for the composer and musical audiences though all this
may be inconceivable to us right now. For example, we do not even
clearly understand the relationships between the spontaneous and the
cautious, the contemplative and the planned in musical art.”

Whitney sees another relationship between the graphic structure of
his film Permutations and musical structure: “Notice that in music, fre-
quently the first hearing of a piece of music is not transparent to you. In
fact, with better music, often enough (it is a truism), if you’re not totally
familiar with the composer, the sections that you’ll like most in the long
run will be those which are hardest for you to appreciate upon the first
hearing. I would argue that, with my recent films there is this quality: if
you see a film again and again you will discover more structure. It will
become more revealed to you that the whole work is a structure possess-
ing its own kind of pattern integrity. It is unfortunate that our film
viewing conventions do not permit the repetition we allow with music.”
As advanced and sophisticated as Whitney’s theories and films are,
he clearly perceives that his art is, in many ways, still in an embryonic
stage. He asks: “What if eight tones of the musical scale hadn’t been
discovered yet? What if our composers had only four tones to work
with? And. . . what if the pianist had to wait twelve hours before he
could hear the keys he had played? And, on the other hand, what if we
could buy and play in our home these new visual compositions as freely
as we play music recordings? Probably we will soon. And I expect we’ll
soon find the missing notes.”

Bibliography

I. Articles by John Whitney, and
Articles discussing John Whitney.

“The Art of Motion Graphics," Computing Re-
port, v.5, #2 (March, 1969), pp. 10-13.

Association of Computing Machinery. Experi-
ments in Motion Graphics. IBM Monograph
(Fall, 1969).

Bawden, Liz-Anne, ed. Oxford Companion to
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Becker, Leon. “Synthetic Sound and Abstract
Image," Hollywood Quarterly [later Film
Quarterly ], v. 1, #1 (Oct., 1945), pp. 95-96.

Brick, Richard. “John Whitney Interview,
Conducted by Richard Brick, 12/30/69,"
Film Culture #53-54-55 (Spring, 1972),
pp. 39-73. Bibliography and Filmography,
pp. 80-83.

Citron, Jack and John Whitney. “CAMP - com-
puter assisted movie production," Proceed-
ings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference,
San Francsco, 1968, pp. 1299-1305.

Clarke, Sheila. “Computer Turns Director. . . an
Interview with John Whitney,” Kilobaud #7
(July, 1977), pp. 34-40.

Claus, Jurgen. “Die Computerfilme von John
Whitney," in Expansion Der Kunst. Rein-
bek, 1970.

Curtis, David. Experimental Cinema; a Fifty-
year Evolution. London: Studio-Vista, 1971.

Curtis, David and Richard Francis, eds. Film as
Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910—
1975. London: Hayward Gallery, 1979.

Davis, Douglas. Art and the Future: A

History/Prophecy of the Collaboration be-

tween Science, Technology and Art. New
York: Praeger, 1973. pp. 98-99.

Dwoskin, Steve. Film Is: The International Free
Cinema. New York: Overlook, 1975.

Franke, Herbert W. Computer Graphics,
Computer Art. New York: Phaidon, 1971.
pp. 93-97.

Hein, Birgit and Wulf Herzogenrath, eds. Film
als Film: 1910 bis Heute. Cologne: Kol-
nischer Kunstverein, 1978.

Hein, Birgit. Film im Underground. Frankfurt:
Ullstein, 1971.

Lamont, Austin. “Interview with John Whitney
by Austin Lamont,” Film Comment, v.6, #3
(Fall, 1970), pp. 28-33.

Langsner, Jules. “Kinetics in L.A.," Art in
America, v.60, #3 (May- June, 1967),
pp. 107-109.

Lawder, D. Standish. The Cubist Cinema. New
York, New York University Press, 1975.

LeGrice, Malcolm. Abstract Film and Beyond.
Cambridge: MIT, 1977.

Leyda, Jay. “Exploration of New Film Tech-
niques," A rt and Architecture, v.65 (Dec.,
1945), pp. 38-39 & 56.

“Luminous Art of the Computer," Life, v.65,
#19 (Nov. 8, 1968), pp. 52-58.

Manvell, Roger, ed. Experiment in the Film.
London: Grey Walls, 1949. pp. 140-141.

Moritz, William. “Beyond ‘Abstract'

Criticism,” Film Quarterly, v.31, #3
(Spring, 1978), pp. 29-39'.

220 Bibliography

Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music: A Neglected
Art. New York: Norton, 1977. pp. 193-197.

Renan, Sheldon. An Introduction to the

American Underground Film. New York:
Dutton, 1967.

Rondolino, Gianni. Storia del Cinema
D'Animazione. Turin: Einaudi, 1974.
pp. 339-347.

Russett, Robert and Cecile Starr, eds. Experi-
mental Animation: an Illustrated Anthology.
New York: Van Nostrand, 1976.

Scheugl, Hans, and Ernst Schmidt Jr. Fine
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Avant garde - , Experimental - und Under-
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2 vols.

Sitney, P. Adams, ed. The Avant-Garde Film: a
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pp. 83-86]

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film; second edi-
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Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. New
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. “Audio-Visual Music: Color Music -
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. “Audio-Visual Music," Circle #10

(Summer, 1948), pp. 4-10. [same text as Art
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Whitney, John H. “An Abstract Film-maker's
View of the Belgium Experimental Film
Competition (1963) and All," Film Culture
#37 (Summer, 1965), pp. 24-26.

. “A.S.I.D. Talk - Design Conference,
Catalina, 1962," Film Culture #37 (Sum-
mer, 1965), pp. 21-24.

. “Animation Mechanisms," American

Cinematographer, v.52 #1 (Jan., 1971),
pp. 26-31.

“Back to Baroque," Interface, v.l, #5

(April, 1976), pp. 43-44.

“Bewegungsbilder und elektronische

Musik," die Reihe: Information iiber serielle
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“Computational Periodics," in Leavitt,

Ruth, ed. Artist and Computer. New York:
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“A Computer Art for the Video Picture

Wall," Art International, v.15, #7 (Sept. 20,
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“Culture for Computers," Interface, v.l,

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Program Notes from the U.S.A. Interna-
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“Digital Pyrotechnics: The Computer in

Visual Arts," First Computer Faire Pro-
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“Discussion with John Whitney Re-
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. “Excerpts from a Talk Given at Califor-
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. “Fireworks: Ancient and Modern,”

Interface, v.l, #6 (May, 1976), pp. 30-33 +.
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“Fireworks: Ancient and Modern," Be-
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“Further Reflections of a Culture Sav-
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22-23.

“John Whitney at CalTech," Survey #5:

Experiments in Art and Technology, Los
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“Moving Pictures and Electronic

Music," die Reihe, #7: Form - Space. Bryn
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“Music Space - Computer Time,” Los

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221

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pp. 12-14.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Godel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid; a Metaphorical Fugue
on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis
Carroll. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Hoyle, Sir Fred. Frontiers of Astronomy. New
York, Harper, 1955.

Huang, Al. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.

222 Bibliography

Moab, Utah: Real People, 1973.

Jaffe, Hans L.C. Piet Mondrian. New York:
Abrams, 1970.

Janis, Harriet and Sidney Janis. “Marcel

Duchamp: Anti- Artist," View, series 5, #1
(March, 1945), pp. 18-24 + . [The Duchamp
Issue],

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in
Art. New York: Wittenborn, 1972.

Kenner, Hugh. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buck-
minster Fuller. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Kepes, Gyorgy. The New Landscape. Chicago:
Theobald", 1956.

Klee. Paul. The Pedagogical Sketchbook. New
York: Praeger. 1960.

Leavitt, Ruth, cd. Artist and Computer.

New York: Harmony, 1976.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. New
York: Schocken. 1979.

Malevich, Kasimir. The Non-Objective World.
Chicago: Theobald, 1959.

Malina, Frank J., ed. Kinetic Art: Theory and
Practice: Selections from the Journal
Leonardo. New York: Dover, 1974.

Michelson, Annette. "Camera Lucida, Camera
Obscura," Artforum, v.9, #5 (Jan., 1973),
pp. 30-37.

Mondrian, Piet. Plastic Art and Pure Plastic
Art. New York: Wittenborn, 1945.

Ovcry, Paul. Kandinsky: The Language of the
Lye. New York: Praeger, 1969.

Paz, Octavio. Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduc-
tion. Ithaca: Cornell, 1970.

Plato. Philebus: Plato's Examination of Plea-
sure. New York: Bobbs-Merrill (Library of
Liberal Arts), 1960.

Poggioli, Renato. Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1968.

Popper, Frank. Origins and Development
of Kinetic Art. New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 1968.

Rameau, Jean Philippe. Treatise on Harmony ;
New York: Dover, 1971.

Rcichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity:

The Computer and the Arts. (A Studio

International Special Issue). New York:
Praeger, 1968.

Cybernetics: Art and Ideas. New York
Graphic Society, 1971.

Rickey, George. Constructivism - Origins and
Evolution. New York: Braziller, 1967.

Rosenberg, Harold. The De-Definition of Art:
Action Art to Pop to Earthworks. New York:
Horizon, 1972.

Rotzler, Willy. Constructive Concepts: a History
of Constructive Art from Cubism to the
Present. New York: Rizzoli, 1977.

Rubin, William S. Dada, Surrealism, and Their
Heritage. New York: Museum of Modern
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Russctt, Robert and Cecilc Starr, eds. Experi-
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Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty. New
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Senechal, Marjorie and George Fleck, eds.
Patterns of Symmetry. Amherst: U of Mas-
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Spencer Brown, G. Laws of Form. New York,
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Stauffacher, Frank, ed. Art in Cinema: A
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Thayer, Alexander Wheelock. Life of Beethoven,
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Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors:
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Tuchman, Maurice, cd. Report on the Art and
Technology Program of the Los Angeles
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L.A.C.M.A., 1971.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and
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New York: International Universities
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Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New
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Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols of Indian
Art and Civilization. (Bollingen Series VI)
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Zuckerkandl, Victor. Man the Musician. (Bol-
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Sound and Symbol ; Music and the Ex-
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New York: Pantheon, 1956.

Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An
Overview of the New Physics. New York:
Morrow, 1979.

224 Bibliography

John Whitney Filmography

Untitled film of lunar eclipse (1939), 5 min.,
color, silent [8mm].

Twenty-Four Variations (with brother James
Whitney, 1939-40), 5 min., color, silent,
[8mm].

Three untitled films (with brother James

Whitney, 1940-42), 5 min. each, color, silent,
[8mm],

Film Exercise #1 (with James Whitney, 1943),

5 min., color, sound: synthesized pendulum
music.

Film Exercises #2 and #2 (with James Whitney,
1944), 4 min., color, sound: synthesized
pendulum music.

Film Exercise # 4 (with James Whitney, 1944),

7 min., color, sound: synthesized pendulum
music.

Film Exercise #5 (with James Whitney, 1944),

5 min., color, sound: synthesized pendulum
music.

Celery Stalks at Midnight (oil-wipe technique,
ca. 1952), 3 min., color, sound: Will Bradley.

Flat House (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952), 3 min.,
color, sound: Dizzy Gillespie.

Mozart Rondo (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952),

3 min. color, sound: Mozart's “Rondo a la
Turca."

Old Macdonald Had a Farm (oil-wipe tech-
nique, ca. 1952), 3 min., color, sound:
children's song.

Chimes Blues (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952), 3
min., black-and-white, sound: Turk Murphy.

Third Man Theme (oil-wipe technique, ca.

1952), 3 min., black-and-white, zither
sound. Anton Karas.

Down Home Rag (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952),

3 min., black-and-white, sound: Red Nichols.

Egyptian Fantasy (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952),
3 min., black-and-white, sound: Sidney
Bechet.

/ Want to Linger (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952),

3 min., black-and-white, Pete Daily.

Drums West (oil-wipe technique, ca. 1952),

3 min., black-and-white, sound: Shelley
Manne.

Lion Hunt (produced at U.P.A. studios, 1955),

3 min., color, sound, [35mm].

Blues Pattern (produced at U.P.A. studios,

1955), 3 min., color, sound, [35mm],

Performing Painter (produced at U.P.A. studios,
1955), 3 min., color, sound, [35mm].

Catalog (collection of computer-graphic effects,
1961), 7 min., color, sound: Ornette Coleman.

Hommage to Rameau (computer graphic, 1967),
3 min., color, sound: Rameau's “La Timide"
and “Premier Tambourin'' from Pieces De
Clavecin En Concerts.

Permutations (computer graphic, 1968), 8 min.,
color, sound: Indian tabla music by
Balachandra on 16mm prints.

Experiments in Motion Graphics (prepared as a
silent film to accompany lecture at Aspen,
1967; narration added 1968), 13 min., color,
sound.

Osaka 1-2-3 (computer graphic, 1970) 3 min.,
black-and-white, sound: kabuki music.

Matrix l (computer graphic, 1971) 6 min., color,
sound: Antonio Soler sonatas arranged and
performed on piano by Delores Stevens.

Matrix II (same computer graphic visuals as
Matrix I, 1971) 6 min., color, sound: music
from Terry Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air.

225

Matrix III (computer graphic, 1972) 11 min.,
color, sound: music from Terry Riley's
Rainbow In Curved Air.

Hex Demo (computer graphic, 1973) 3 min.,
black-and-white, silent to accompany lec-
tures, demonstrating digital harmony.

Arabesque (computer graphic, 1975) 7 min.,
color, sound: Manoocheher Sadeghi.

Permutations II (computer graphic footage of
Permutations re-edited, 1979) 7 min., color,
sound: original score composed by William
Kraft. This version available on videodisc or
videotape.

The 16mm films listed above are available
in 16mm prints and videotapes from
Pyramid Films, Box 1048, Santa Monica,
California 90406, (213) 390-3456. A
videodisc containing three films by John
Whitney (Permutations II, Matrix I, and
Arabesque) is available from MCA Disco-
vision, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal
City, California 91608, (213) 985-4321.

226 Filmography

Index

Adams, Henry [American author (1838-1918)
fascinated equally with the mysticism of the
Middle Ages and the dynamism of modern
technology (Europe vs. America) which he
wrote about in Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres (1904) and his autobiography The
Education of Henry Adams (1906), espe-
cially the chapter “The Dynamo and the
Virgin. “1 1.

Addison, Joseph [British author and statesman
(1672-1719), collaborated with Richard
Steele on two journals. The Tatter and The
Spectator, which are the prototype of mod-
ern newsmagazines, containing reviews,
features, etc. J 191.

Albers. Josef [German artist (1888-1976),
studied and taught at the Bauhaus, emigrated
to U.S. 1933, taught at Black Mountain,
Harvard and Yale. Noted for color theories
outlined in the book Interaction of Color
(1963) and demonstrated in the series of
paintings “Homage to the Square."] 89.

Alexeieff, Alexander [Russian animator
(1901- ), working in Paris, developed

pin-board animation technique for films
illustrating Mussorgsky's Night on Bald
Mountain (1934) and Pictures at an Exhibi-
tion (1972), both in collaboration with Claire
Parker.] 22n.

Alice in Wonderland [classic novel for chil-
dren and adults interested in logic, written
by “Lewis Carroll" who was actually
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898),
British mathematician. In one scene, Alice is
ordered to play croquet according to court
etiquette, with flamingos as mallets and

hedgehogs as balls, which proves too
inefficient for her Victorian bourgeois taste,
albeit whimsical and diverting for the
aristocrats.] 39.

Anschultz, Dr. Dean. 8.

Aristotle [Greek philosopher (384-322B.C.),
rival of Plato, associated with rationalism
and proto-scientific investigative spirit that
believes everyday, physical phenomena con-
stitute essential, enduring, provable reality.]
158,200.

Art in Cinema Festival ISan Francisco

Museum of Art, 1946; catalogue edited by
Stauffacher, 1947.] 144.

Art Nouveau glass [especially the iridescent
favrile glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany
(1848-1933) was produced by secret pro-
cesses, and only in the 60s were successful
imitations made.] 159.

Bach, Johann Sebastian [German composer
(1685-1750) who, with George Frideric
Handel (1685-1759) and Antonio Vivaldi
(1678-1741), brought Baroque musical
forms to perfection.] 25, 118, 126, 194.

Ballet Mecanique, see Leger, Fernand

Bass, Saul [American graphic designer

(1920- ) noted for striking titles to many

Hollywood features, as well as his own short
Why Man Creates (1968) and his science-
fiction feature Phase IV (1973).] 156, 183.

Bauhaus [Noted German school of design
(founded 1919 by Walter Gropius) that
promoted pure and simple, abstract and
utilitarian “modern" look. Kandinsky, Klee,
Moholy-Nagy, and many other distinguished

227

artists taught there. Closed in 1933 by
Nazis.] 21, 31-32, 151, 165, 172.

Beethoven, Ludwig van IGerman composer
(1770-1827) whose brilliant career bridged
the Classical and Romantic eras. His Pas-
toral Symphony was visualized by Disney
in Fantasia as a mythological idyll with
female centaurs wearing lipstick.] 1, 22,
24-25, 117, 126, 207.

Belgium Experimental Film Competitions

(1949, 1958, 1963) 161-166, 177, 180.

Belson, Jordan [American abstract filmmaker
(1926- ), mounted pioneer “light

shows” {Vortex Concerts, 1957-9), created
series of films {Allures, 1961-present) mix-
ing scientific and mystical allusions in dy-
namic, mysteriously polymorphous flows]
144, 180.

Berg, Alban [Austrian composer (1885-1935),
disciple of Schoenberg from 1904, using
atonal and serial principles in chamber
works and two operas Wozzeck (1914-1921)
and Lulu (1928-1934)] 68, 151.

Bertoia, Harry [Italian sculptor (1915-1978)
lived in U.S. since 30s, designed famous
molded chair for Eames Studio, noted for
monumental and small metal sculptures,
many of which create musical sounds when
parts touch together] 138.

Boulez, Pierre [French composer (1925- ),

student of Messiaen, espoused serial music
and, as conductor, promoted avant-garde
music.] 15.

Bowman, Jack. 9.

Bradley, Will [American Jazz musician

(1912- ) and composer whose hits in-

clude Celerx Stalks at Midnight ( 1 947 ) j
177, 217.

Brakhage, Stan [Prolific American experimen-
tal filmmaker (1933- ) who pioneered

the handheld subjective camera as an
“abstract expressionist” tool in such films
as Dog Star Man (1961-4) and Thigh Line
Lyre Triangular (1961).] 164, 200.

Bronowski, Dr. Jacob [Polish mathematician
(1908-1974) and Philosopher of History,
perhaps best remembered for his Ascent of
Man (1973) book and video series] 158.

Bute, Mary Ellen [American animator

(1908- ), made abstract shorts for Radio

City Music Hall 1936-1957, later live-action
features.] 22.

Butterfield, David. 9.

Cage, John [Radical American composer
(1912- ) noted for experiments (many

related to Taoism and Buddhism) with
chance factors, noise and nonmusical
sounds, silence, electronic music, and con-
ceptual pieces.] 1, 16, 26, 39.

California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
170, 172.

California Institute of the Arts. 32.

Cartesian co-ordinates [a system for making a
graph or map on a two-dimensional surface,
using an X-axis and Y-axis on 2 sides of
the graph. Named after its inventor Rene
Descartes, French mathematician and philos-
opher ( 1596- 1650)] 47-48, 51, 55, 65, etc.

Cathedrale engloutie, see Debussy

Chartres, see Gothic

Chomsky, Noam [American linguistic philoso-
pher (1928- ) and professor at M.I.T.,

noted for positing Transformational or
Generative grammar.] 33, 41-42.

Churchill, Sir Winston [British Statesman and
amateur painter (1874—1965)] 35.

Cinema 16, see Vogel

Citron, Dr. Jack [of IBM, L.A.J 8.

Clark, Sir Kenneth [British Art Historian
(1903- ) and curator of the National

Gallery in London. Author of many distin-
guished books of art criticism, but perhaps
best remembered for his book and video
series Civilisation (1975).] 158.

Cologne Festival of Electronic Music (1951)
162.

Color organs [Instruments for producing color
imagery. Theorized by Leonardo da Vinci
and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), among
notable practical models were Louis Castel's
clavecin oculaire (1720), A. Wallace Rim-
ington's color organ (1895, used by Scriabin
1914), and Thomas Wilfrid's Clavilux
(1922). 14, 22, 48, 139.

Conrad, Tony [American experimental film-
maker (1940- ) associated with Struc-

tural Film Movement through such films
as Flicker (1966).] 138.

Constructivism [Russian abstract art move-
ment, sponsored by Vladimir Tatlin ca. 1917,
which favored pure primary shapes and col-
ors, and modern materials. Influential on all
other abstract art, Bauhaus, etc ., and the

228

Index

name is often used to designate all non-
objective art. ] 17, 172, 203.

Copernicus, Nicolaus [Polish astronomer

(1473-1543) who pioneered the idea that the
Earth revolved and orbited around the sta-
tionary Sun.] 158.

Cuba, Larry [American computer-animation
filmmaker (1950- ), whose films include

First Fig (1974), 3178 , (1978), and Two
Space (1979).] 8.

Dada [Art movement ca. 1915-1923 bent upon
the outrage and destruction of bourgeois
worship of traditional art standards. Leading
proponents included Marcel Duchamp, Man
Ray, and Francis Picabia (1879-1953).
Dadaists merged with Surrealism ca. 1924]

4, 39.

Debussy, Claude [French composer (1862-1918)
noted for his reaction against Wagnerianism,
and his use of whole-tone harmonies in his
“impressionistic" tone poems Afternoon of
a Faun (1894), The Sea (La Mer, 1905),

The Engulfed Cathedra I (Cafhedrale Fng-
loutie, 1910), etc.] 24, 68, 85-86, 205.

DeMille, Cecil B. [American feature film direc-
tor (1881-1959) associated with Holly-
wood spectacle movies such as Ten
Commandments (1924 and 1956) depicting
the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt.] 201.

Dewey, John [American philosopher ( 1859—
1952) who expounded Pragmatism, and ad-
vanced psychology and educational theory.]
192-193.

Disney, Walt [American producer of children's
films (1901-1966) noted for his studios'
Mickey Mouse and feature-length cartoons,
among them Fantasia (1940) in which sym-
phonic music was illustrated by cartoon
figures. See Oskar Fischinger] 126, 163.

Duchamp, Marcel IFrench artist (1887-1968)
associated with Dada, whose radical ideas
(the “readymade," art as idea, etc.) have
dominated contemporary arts.] 147-148, 21 L

Eames, Charles (1907-1978) and Ray, his wife
[American designers whose studios won
many prizes for furniture, exhibits, films,
graphics, etc. ] 11.

Eggeling, Viking [Swedish artist (1880-1925)
associated with Dada, made “constructivist"
films Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra (1921)

and Diagonal Symphony (1925)] 22.

Eisenstein, Sergei [Russian film director ( 1 898—
1948) famous for his montage theories dem-
onstrated in silent political features like
Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), and
his sound epics like Ivan the Terrible ( 1 943—
1946) which depicts, with operatic rapport
between Prokofiev's music and “artful"
stylized imagery, the historical defeat of the
Boyar noblemen.] 201.

Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT]
30-31, 171-172.

Fairbanks, Douglas Sr. [American movie star
(1883-1939) famous for roles in swashbuck-
ler movies like Mark ofZorro (1921).] 54-55.

First West Coast Computer Faire, San Fran-
cisco, 1977. 7, 213.

Fischinger, Oskar [German abstract animator
and painter (1900-1967), moved to Hol-
lywood 1936, proposed idea for Disney's
Fantasia and designed wholly nonobjec-
tive Bach fugue for this feature, but Disney
changed all geometric forms to look like
objects, and Fischinger quit. Won Grand
Prix at 1949 Belgium Experimental Film
Competition for his abstract Motion Paint-
ing.] 22, 138, 163, 174.

Flaming Creatures (1963) [American experi-
mental film by Jack Smith (1932- )

which portrays the agonies and ecstasies of
a transvestite underworld; created a sensa-
tion, banned, etc., when first shown.] 164.

Flemish Polyphonists ]a school of composers,
including Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474),
Johannes Ockeghem (1420-1496), Josquin
Des Pres (1440-1521) and Orland di Lasso
(1520-1594), noted for their intricate motets
and choral works.] 25.

Fontana, Lucio [Italian artist (1899-1968) who
blurred the boundaries of painting and
sculpture by piercing canvases, building pro-
jecting “sculpture" pieces onto painted can-
vases, arranging happenings, etc.] 211.

Fuller, Richard Buckminster [American ar-
chitect (1895- ) noted for promulgation

of the geodesic dome, as well as ecological
and philosophical speculations.] 67, 193,

206.

Futurism [Italian art movement (1909-1915)
which espoused modern technology,
dynamic movement, noise of machinery.

229

etc.] 203.

Gabo, Naum [Russian constructivist sculptor
(1890-1977) emigrated to Berlin, Paris, and
U.S.] 211.

Gaudi y Cornet, Antonio [Spanish architect
(1852-1926) noted for his fanciful and or-
ganic buildings. ] 125.

Generative Grammar, see Transformational
Grammar

Gericault, Theodore IFrench painter ( 1791—
1824) who, with Eugene Delacroix, brought
to fruition the Romantic taste for exoticism
and turbulent drama, especially in The Raft
of the Medusa, 1819.] 37-38.

Gillespie, Dizzy [American jazz musician and
composer (1917- ) whose hits included

Hot House (1945).] 178.

Glass, Philip [American composer (1937- )

noted for his intricate rhythmic structures,
especially his opera Einstein on the Beach,
1976.] 72.

Goldmark, Peter [American engineer ( 1906—
1977), developed the long-playing record for
Columbia, contributed substantially to color
television technology. With CBS until 1971]
207.

Gothic Rose windows architecture [13th cen-
tury. Huge circular stained glass windows
containing abstract imagery of the Mystic
Rose grace many splendid cathedrals, nota-
bly those at Chartres and Nctre Dame at
Paris.] 1, 109, 205.

Grant, Dwinell [American abstract filmmaker
(1912- ) whose Compositions (1940-

1949) were recognized with a Guggenheim
grant.] 138.

Gregory, Saint JPope (590-604) who estab-
lished rigorous rules for permissible church
music that yielded the “Gregorian Chants."]
199.

Group de Recherche d’art Visuel. 164.

Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. 177,

216.

Haydn, Joseph [Austrian composer ( 1732—

1809) who, with Mozart, brought to perfec-
tion the rococo classical forms.] 16.

Hitchcock, Alfred [British film director
(1899-1980), worked in Hollywood since
1939 on dozens of suspense thrillers includ-
ing Vertigo (1959)] 183.

Hoyle, Sir Fred [British astronomer (1915- )

who propounded the steady-state theory
of expanding universe r.v. creation of
matter, and also the theory that more com-
plex elements were created by fusion of
hydrogen atoms. ] 202.

I Ching [Ancient Chinese Taoist Scripture,

“The Book of Changes," designed for prog-
nostication by casting lots.] 32.

IBM [Originally Computing-Tabulating-Record-
ing Co., since 1924 International Business
Machines Co.] 29-30, 129-130, 179, 181.

Islamic pattern and design. 1, 39, 109, 113.

Ivens, Joris [ Dutch documentary filmmaker
(1898- ) who began making “poetic"

shorts like Rain (1929) before graduating to
feature-length documentaries in the 30s. J
22, 157-158.

Jolson, Al [American actor-singer (1883-1950)
whose 1927 movie The Jazz Singer was the
first commercially successful sound film.] 13.

Kandinsky, Wassily [Russian painter ( 1 866—
1944) who pioneered abstract painting in
Germany, taught at the Bauhaus, and moved
to France in 1933.] 17, 37-38, 125, 138, 211.

Kepes, Gyorgy [Hungarian artist (1906- ),

M.I.T. professor, whose works include experi-
mental photography, Fire Orchard (1972)
a 20-foot field of gas jets synchronized to
Sir William Walton's music, and books such
as Language of Vision (1944) and The New
Landscape in Art and Science (1956).] 158.

Kim, Scott. 9.

Klee, Paul [Swiss painter (1879-1940) associ-
ated with Kandinsky in the Blue Rider
Group (Munich, 1911) and teaching at the
Bauhaus (1921-1933): noted for whimsical
abstractions, and his theoretical writing
Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925).] 89, 203.

Knokke [site of the Belgium Experimental Film
Festivals, q. v. J 161.

Krenek, Ernst [Austrian composer

(1900- ) whose music has encompassed

romantic, neoclassical, jazz, atonal and se-
rial modes. Emigrated to U.S. 1938. Studies
in Counterpoint (1940) includes a pioneer
explanation of the tone-row principles.] 151.

Lai, Augustine. 9.

Lascaux [Site in France of some of the best

230

Index

preserved and most numerous prehistoric
cave paintings. ] 84.

Ledoux, Jacques [curator of Royal Belgian
Film Archives, and Director of Belgium Ex-
perimental Film Festivals ] 138.

Leger, Fernand [French cubist painter ( 1881—
1955) who favored mechanic, metallic
imagery suggesting the dynamism of 20th
century. His film Ballet Mecanique (1924),
composed of shots of machinery, still life
arrangements and human actions (especially
the washerwoman loop) edited rhythmically
with no plot, is a touchstone of avant-garde
cinema. J 21, 72, 101, 111.

Leibowitz, Rene [French composer and con-
ductor ( 1913- 1972), pupil of Webern and
Schonberg, major promoter of serial music
in France through his compositions, his
productions and performances, and his book
Introduction to 12-Tone Music. ] 1, 174.

Leonardo da Vinci [Italian artist (1452-1519)
and Renaissance Man, whose secret note-
books contain sketches and speculations
about all sorts of machinery, from “airplanes”
to “bicycles” to “color organs.”] 14, 22, 139.

Levi-Strauss, Claude [Belgian anthropologist
(1908- ) associated with Sartre's exis-

tentialism, and propounder of Structural
Anthropology.] 205.

Lissajous curves [shapes produced by the
intersection of two curves at right angles
to each other. Name for Jules-Antoine
Lissajous (1822-1880), but in England
called Bowditch curves after Nathaniel
Bowditch (1773-1838).] 76, etc. 171.

Lustig, Alvin, [leading American typographical
designer, and early mentor of the author.
Taught at California School of Fine Arts
(later San Francisco Art Institute) and Art
Center College of Design. Moved to New
York in 50s: designed book covers for New
Directions, and redesigned Look magazine.
Died young in 50s. | 156.

Lye, Len [New Zealand animator and sculptor
(1901-1980) who drew directly on film
(abstract Color Box, 1935) and pioneered
optical printing techniques (Trade Tattoo,
1937). Worked in England and U.S.] 22,

163.

McLaren, Norman [Scotch animator
(1914- ), worked for National Film

Board of Canada since 40s, producing many
popular animation films in all styles, includ-
ing some abstractions drawn directly on
film.] 22, 163, 177, 217.

McLuhan, Marshall [Canadian social phi-
losopher (1911- ), best known for the

“medium is the message” theory of Under-
standing Media (1964).] 138.

Mahler, Gustav [Austrian composer ( 1 860—
1911) who extended Wagnerian principles in
his monumental symphonies.] 68.

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig [German mod-
ernist architect (1886-1969), taught at the
Bauhaus, promulgated famous dictum “Less
is More,” and pioneered glass skyscrapers
of “skin and bones construction.”] 125.

Minsky, Marvin L. [American computer scien-
tist (1927- ), educated at Harvard and

Princeton, since 1964 at M.I.T. as director of
the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ] 124.

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo [Hungarian constructivist
artist (1895-1946), taught at Bauhaus, and
emigrated to U.S. 1937 where he founded a
“New Bauhaus” school of design in
Chicago.] 211.

Moire [from French “watered": illusionary
patterns created when two or more other
patterns overlap] 51.

Mondrian, Piet [Dutch painter (1872-1944) as-
sociated with de Stijl. He named his refined,
severe abstraction (only primary colors on
rectanguale grids) neoplasticism. ] 125, 147—
148, 195, 201, 211.

Moritz, William. 10.

Morton, Lawrence. 10.

Mosxkowski, Richard. 9.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus [Austrian com-
poser (1756-1791) who, with Haydn,
brought the classical rococo style and forms
to perfection.] 16, 55, 194, 203.

Museum of Modern Art, New York [Founded
1929; since 1935 pioneer film department
with study and preservation programs,
and since 40s, a distribution system.] 144,
176, 180.

Musical Offering, see Bach

New American Cinema [Independent Film
Movement of the 60s, centering around
Jonas Mekas and Film Culture . ] 32-33,

164.

Newell, Paul. 9.

231

Newton, Sir Isaac [British mathematician
(1642-1727) who formulated “laws” of
gravity, etc. ] 15.

Notre Dame, see Gothic

O’Doherty, Brian. 11.

Oldenburg, Claes [American Pop Artist
(1929- ) noted for his whimsical soft

sculptures and happenings.] 31.

Pascal [computer language] 7, 9, 97, 129-130.

Pastoral Symphony, see Beethoven

Pierce, John R. [American mathematician and
computer scientist (1910- ). Doctorate

CalTech, where, since 1971 he has been
Professor of Engineering at JPL. Writes
science fiction under the name J. J. Coupling]
192.

Plato [Greek philosopher (428-347 B.C.) who
reported and probably amplified the teach-
ings of Socrates (470-399), which favored
the existence of absolute, independent
“forms” that are truly perfect and immor-
tal, while everyday reality is an unsatisfac-
tory partial reflection of these forms.] 125,
201 .

Polar coordinates [a system for making a
graph or map of a three-dimensional, spher-
ical object on a two-dimensional working-
surface.] 49-51, 55, 65, etc.

Pollock, Jackson [American painter ( 1912—
1956) who perfected “Abstract Expression-
ism” or “Action Painting” by pouring paint
directly on canvas without brushing, as a
dynamic document of the painter's mood
and movement.] 21, 37-38, 211.

Pomona College, California. 1, 174.

Port Royal Grammer [a philosophical

grammar formulated in 17th-century France
by the Port-Royal hermits who wished to
find common denominators among all lan-
guages, and hence prefigured modern Struc-
tural Linguistics and Transformational
Grammar.] 41.

Pythagoras [Greek philosopher (582 B.C.-ca.
500) who posited natural laws of harmony
and number. Left no writings, but his cult
developed into virtually religious pro-
portions, and as late as 50 A.D. a temple of
Pythagoras was suppressed by the Roman
Emperor Claudius.] 1, 4-5, 15, 65, 81, 113,
191, 217-218.

Rameau, Jean Philippe [leading French
baroque composer (1683-1764) noted for
harpsichord music and opera-ballet
spectacles. His Treatise on Harmony (1722)
first verbalized “inversions.”] 191.

Ray, Man [American artist (1890-1976) associ-
ated with Dada and Surrealism in Paris,
pioneered photographic techniques, and
made early experimental films such as
Return to Reason, 1923] 157, 163, 175.

Reich, Steve [American composer (1936- )

noted for works using electronic delay and
phasing ( Come Out, 1966) and ensembles of
similar instruments in which chance and
planned coordination between different
performers playing similar material create
astonishing meshing and unmeshing
effects.] 72.

Reiniger, Lotte [German animator (1899- )

who made the first feature-length animation
film Prince Achmed (1926) using a silhou-
ette technique that she also employed for
short illustrations of scenes from Mozart's
Magic Flute and Bizet's Carmen.] 22.

Riley, Terry [American composer (1935) noted
for his lush-textured compositions utilizing
feedback, tape delay and other electronic
phasing and layering of instruments playing
hypnotic, repetitive phrases.] 22.

Rodchenko, Alexander [Russian constructivist
artist (1891- 1956) who coined the term “non-
objective” in 1913. J 211.

Rosenberg, Harold [a leading American critic
of modernist and postmodernist art
(1906-1978)] 4-5.

Rother, Paul. 9.

Rothko, Mark [American painter (1903-1970)
whose work is characterized by large serene
canvases brushed with two colors in contem-
plative balance between a small rectangu-
lar space in one color and a “background”
of the other color, consisting of the canvas
shape itself.] 21.

Rozzelle, Ron. 11.

Ruttmann, Walther [German painter and
filmmaker (1887-1941) who pioneered
abstract animation in the early 20s but
moved into special effects, documentary and
feature films after the pheonomenal success
of Berlin in 1927. J 22.

Sadeghi, Manoocheher [contemporary Iranian

232

Index

classical musician] 113.

San Francisco Museum of Art. 144.

Santayana, George [Spanish philosopher
(1863-1952) studied at Harvard under
William James, later lived at Oxford and
Rome. A skeptic humanist, his aesthetic
theories are outlined in several books from
Sense of Beauty (1896) to Realms of Being
(1828-1940).] 192, 193.

Scarlatti, Domenico [Italian composer ( 1685—
1757), son of opera composer Alessandro; a
keyboard virtuoso, he wrote numerous
intricate “sonatas" for harpsichord. Later
worked in Spain.] 101, 123.

Schoenberg, Arnold [Austrian composer
(1874-1951) who propounded radical
theories of atonalism and serialism. Fled to
Los Angeles during World War II. Proto-
type for Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus.] 1, 5,
16, 21, 25-26, 68, 151, 159, 174, 204.

Scriabin, Alexander [Russian composer

(1872-1915) who fell under the influence of
Theosophy and composed his Prometheus:
Poem of Fire (1911) to be performed with
color visual imagery, e.g. with Rimington's
color organ, 1914. ] 17.

Sharits, Paul [American experimental
filmmaker (1943- ) associated with

Structural Film Movement through loop,
flicker and other reflexive films. ] 138.

Skater’s Waltz, by French composer Emil
Waldteufel (1837-1915). 157.

Smith, David [American sculptor (1906-1965)
trained as auto assembler, specializes in
sculptural collages and monumental metal
works.] 16.

Smith, Harry [American filmmaker

(1923- ), made a series of abstract films

in 40s and early 50s, some drawn directly
on film, some elaborately optical-printed.
Guggenheim grant. Mid-50s, feature-length
mystical animation film Heaven and Earth
Magic with cutouts in Surrealist collage
style.] 144.

Smith, Tony [American sculptor (1912- ),

studied architecture at New Bauhaus,
Chicago, and apprenticed under Frank Lloyd
Wright. Noted for monumental. Minimal
metal sculptures.] 204.

Snow, Sir Charles Percy [British scientist and
novelist (1905-1980) whose The Two Cul-
tures and the Scientific Revolution (1959)

delineated the credibility gap between art
and science.] 172.

Socrates, see Plato

Soler, Padre Antonio [Spanish composer and
theoretician (1729-1783) wrote intricate and
serene harpsichord sonatas that influenced
Scarlatti.] 123, 216.

Steinway [19th-century Americn pianos, incor-
porating iron-frame and the sostenuto pedal,
considered the state-of-the-art piano instru-
ment.] 124.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz [leading German van-
guard composer (1928- ) whose work

encompasses serial music, electronic music
(with use of literal spatial movement of
music in a quadrophonic context), and ex-
periments with “parameters," chance ele-
ments inspired by John Cage. Works in
Cologne. [ 160.

Stradivarius [violins made by the Stradivari
family in 17th and 18th century Italy, still
considered the most excellent of violin in-
struments.] 124-125, 191.

Stravinsky, Igor [major Russian composer
(1882-1971) whose career (like that of
Picasso in painting) brilliantly encompassed
most styles of 20th-century music, from the
nationalistic Romanticism of Rimsky-
Korsakov to the serial formulas of Webern.
Disney used his Rite of Spring in Fantasia,
illustrating it with scenes of dinosaurs.] 5,
39, 101, 126, 218.

“Structural” Film [Reflexive independent film
movement of the 60s and 70s, posited by
P. Adams Sitney of Film Culture. Michael
Snow (Canadian, 1929- ), whose

Wavelength won the Grand Prize at the
Belgium Experimental Film Competition
in 1967, best represents the movement.]
33-34, 138.

Structural Linguistics [or simply Structuralism:
a school of Linguistics based on writings
of Ferdinand dc Saussure (Swiss, 1 857—
1913), which attempts to break language
down into its smallest elements of mean-
ing, always distinguishing between speech
(a particular event) and language (the
general rules). ] 33-34, 42.

Sutherland, Ivan E. [American computer sci-
entist (1941- ), doctorate from M.I.T.,

taught at Harvard and since 1976 at Cal-
Tech.] 190.

233

Tatlin, Vladimir [Russian artist (1885-1953?)
who founded Constructivist movement.
Worked often as stage and film designer.]
211 .

Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich [Russian composer
(1840-1893), the epitome of Romantic
music, beloved for his melodious sym-
phonies, operas, ballets and concertos.] 67.

TEKniques [Tektronix Journal] 130.

Thompson, Frederick B. 8, 172.

Thonet, Michael [German furniture designer
(1796-1871) who pioneered the concept of
bentwood furniture, which he mass-pro-
duced in his Viennese factory. LeCorbusier
and the Bauhaus much influenced by his
work in the 1920s, as well as the Art
Nouveau revival of the 1960s. ] 159.

Transformational Grammar lor Generative
Grammar: a school of Linguistics formed
(partly in revolt against, and partly in exten-
sion of Structuralism) by Noam Chomsky,
q.v., which stresses the comparative rela-
tionships and changes that basic elements of
language go through in order to mean.] 33,
41-42.

2001: A Space Odyssey [ British-American
science-fiction epic movie (1968) directed
by Stanley Kubrick (1928- ), in which a

computer named Hal takes over a space ship
in flight and tries to kill the crew to hide its
own error - presumably an allegory.] 126,
183, 188.

University of California at Los Angeles

[U.C.L.A.]. 1, 113, 178, 179, 217.

Vedanta [Those schools of Hindu philosophy
that base their discussions around the
ancient Sanskrit texts of the Vedas, the
Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the
Bhagavad-Gita. J 202.

Vivaldi, Antonio [Italian composer (1678-171),
genius of the Italian Baroque, composed 80
operas and some 400 concertos including
The Four Seasons for strings. ] 101.

Vogel, Amos [Austrian film entrepreneur and
critic, emigrated to U.S. 1939, founded
Cinema 16 in 1947 as a film society to show
unusual work, and by 1950 began distribut-
ing many classic avant-garde films as well
as the best of contemporary works. Cinema
16 later bought by Grove Press films.] 176.

Vorkapich, Slavko [Yugoslavian filmmaker
(1895-1976), worked in Hollywood from
20s, specializing in dynamic montage
sequences and special effects. Taught at
U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. His experimental films
include Life and Death of a Hollywood
Extra (1927) and live-action illustrations of
Wagner's Forest Murmurs (1936) and Men-
delssohn's Fingal's Cave (1942).] 157.

Wagner, Richard [German opera composer
(1813-1883) noted for his theory of "total-
art- work," expansion of orchestral size, and
experiments with chromatic harmonies.] 4,

6, 67-68.

Webern, Anton [Austrian composer ( 1883—
1945), disciple of Schoenberg from 1904,
who used his atonal and serial principles in
rarefied chamber works.] 68.

Weizenbaum, Joseph [German computer scien-
tist (1923- ), in U.S. since 1950. Com-

posed Slip and Eliza computer languages.

At M.I.T. since 1963.| 124-125.

Well-tempered Clavier, see Bach.

Whitney, Jackie 9-10, 180.

Whitney, James A. [American filmmaker

(1922- ), brother of the author, maker of

acclaimed films Yantra (1955), Lapis (1966),
and recently an incompleted trilogy be-
ginning with Dwija and Wu Miny. ] 9-10,

32, 92-94, 138, 151-155, 180, 186. 202-204.

Whitney, John Jr. [American filmmaker
(1946- ), son of the author. Made 8mm

films (1964); his film Byjina Flores (1966)
made use of slit-scan techniques; 1967:
3-Screen Film; 1971: Terminal Self. Cur-
rently directing the digital scene simulation
division of the motion picture project of
Information International.] 9, 181, 188.

Whitney, Mark. [American filmmaker

(1950- ), son of the author. Collaborated

with James Whitney on film about water
1969-1973; made his own untitled film
about water 1974-1976. Documentaries on
Sam Francis's process of painting, Navajo
Indians, and Carl G. Jung. Intends to renounce
filmmaking for painting. | 9.

Whitney, Michael. [American filmmaker
(1947- ), son of the author. Filmed his

own paintings, 1964. Abstract computer-
animations, 1969, Cria and Binary Bit Pat-
terns. Films on Tai Ch'i master Yin Hsien

234

Index

(1975) which contained the first streak pho-
tography of a motion picture sequence. And
Wu Shu (1980). Since 1975, working on a
documentary about Carl G. Jung as remem-
bered by his colleagues. Since 1968 various
commercial work, logos, special effects
(Futureworld), etc. J 9.

Whitney films:

24 Variations 144-145, 152-153. 160, 175-
176.

Five Abstract Film Exercises 92-94, 138,
144-150, 154, 177.

Oil-Wipe Films 177. 216-217.

Catalog 161, 180, 185-186.

Permutations 196, 204, 217-218.

Matrix / & II 76-77, 196, 197, 216.

Matrix HI 75, 78, 196.

Osaka I, 2, 3, 196.

Arabesque 7-8, 73, 95, 97-113, 126, 131-
132, A-XII-16
Yantra 180, 202.

Lapis 9, 180, 186, 202.

Commercial Work 187-188.

Young, Pearce. 10

235